Lily Twelftree Wants Beauty to Ask Why We Buy
The founder and CEO of Unfiltered on the cold email that got her into beauty, the limits of a sales report, and what she learned about herself after coding her own beta.
Growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Lily Twelftree spent enough time on YouTube to work out one of beauty’s great appeals. You probably couldn’t wear the same dress as Kylie Jenner. You could, however, wear the same lipstick. It was a small, relatively accessible way to take part in the culture she was watching unfold on her screen. And there was always another video ready to tell her exactly which shade to buy.
“Everyone was telling you what to buy,” she tells The Beauty Brief. “And no one was telling why we buy.”
She had the idea for Barefaced in 2020 and began exploring it on TikTok in 2022, using beauty products as a way to talk about marketing, culture, and the things that make us want what we want. Today, as founder and CEO of Unfiltered, she’s taking that curiosity somewhere she thinks it could do some good. Into the rooms where beauty brands decide what to make next.
One cold email and 18 hours in the car
Twelftree liked math enough to enroll in computer science when the pandemic interrupted her post-high-school travel plans. She also knew fairly quickly that she wanted to work in beauty. She cold-emailed the founder of one of her favorite brands, got in the car, and drove 18 hours to Sydney.
Working in-house as a junior content marketer, she saw how much information a brand could collect from its online store, retail sales, and social channels, and how little of it anyone had time to sit down and interpret. She wanted that to be her job. And the further she got into it, the more interested she became in the things a sales report couldn’t answer. It could tell her what sold. What had the shopper considered first? What made them hesitate? What would they have bought if they could find it?
“I really am trying to get customer voices into boardrooms,” she says.
The shop-floor employee knows which shade people keep asking for. The junior marketer knows which product claim keeps prompting the same follow-up question in the comments. Twelftree wants the people making decisions to hear those conversations while there’s still time to act on them.
A brand can have ten benefits. Pick one.
Twelftree gets impatient with beauty’s copycat streak. Another vanilla body mist might make perfect sense if you’re looking at what’s already selling. She’s more interested in the brands that know exactly who they’re speaking to and can say something specific enough to earn that person’s attention.
The same goes for creator partnerships. Twelftree does much of her own beauty discovery through creators, and she can hear when someone is reading the brief back to her. Her advice is to give a campaign one clear idea worth remembering and let each creator find their own way to say it. The brand already chose them for the way they talk to their audience. That’s the part worth paying for.
New York and the gift of the gab
Twelftree had wanted to live in New York since she was a teenager. She figured she’d build the company in Australia first and move once she had some traction. Then a two-week work trip led to interest from an accelerator and a small angel raise. She realized she could start building the relationships she needed while she was still figuring out the company.
She spent much of her first three months in the US coding the beta herself. She could build it, so she assumed she should. The experience gave her a clearer sense of what she actually wanted to do as CEO. “My gift is the gab,” she says. “I have the gift of the gab. I love to chat. I love to connect.” After nearly two years of working on her own, building a team is one of the things she’s most excited about.
A brief detour through the blush aisle
Unfiltered’s public beta focuses on a blush project that drew attention on Instagram. Twelftree and her collaborators analyzed 1,405 shades at Ulta Beauty and classified 570 as Light Spring. True/Cool Summer had 16. When she shared the research on TikTok, she says 1,100 users went to her Google spreadsheet in three days to figure out which blush to buy. There’s a certain determination involved in opening a sheet full of hex codes on your phone because you’d really like a pink that stays pink.
Ask Twelftree what she wants Unfiltered to be known for in five years and her answer comes quickly. “Analytical rigor.” She wants people to see where the numbers came from, how she arrived at a conclusion, and what the research still leaves open. For a founder who came up on a feed full of people telling her what to buy, there’s something fitting about building a place where shoppers can ask better questions of their own.
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