Secrets of the Gloss Boss: meet the self-funded founder turning 5-minute makeup into a beauty empire

When celebrities from Millie Bobby Brown to Nicola Coughlan are clamouring for your light-as-air skin tint, and you simply can’t keep your cushion foundation in stock, you might assume the secret to your success is nailing how to go viral. But for Aimee Connolly, the Dubliner who has built Sculpted By Aimee into one of the defining beauty brands of the past decade before even turning 33, the formula is simpler: create skin-first makeup that women can easily apply in five minutes.

Famous fans: (from left) Serena Williams wears Cream Cushion (shade 9N) and Complete Cover Up (shade Tan Plus). Nicola Coughlan wears HydraLip Balm in Bronze and MyMascara Black. Jessie Buckley in a full face of the brand (Photos: Instagram)

“We are completely complexion-obsessed,” says Connolly. “It’s the first thing people shop for, the number one reason people come back. After all, your final makeup look starts with great skin. A quote I’ve used for years is: ‘Apply it all very easily and feel great.’ It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.”

Writer Becki (left) and Aimee Connolly

Launched in 2016, at a time when much of the beauty industry was focused on multi-step contouring routines, Sculpted By Aimee was built on the opposite premise: fewer products, less stress and better skin. As a makeup artist, she was known for her ‘five minute face’,  a technique that focuses on applying a small number of easy-to-blend products with either your fingers or brushes to create a quick and, most importantly, natural-looking complexion.

It’s an approach she still stands behind today, and her glow-boosting hybrids, easy-to-use palettes and that viral Cream Cushion Foundation became hits because they solved problems women actually had, rather than giving us more to do. We could get ready quickly with only a few essentials to hand.

“I was at a Barry’s Bootcamp class yesterday, and there were two girls in the mirrors touching up with the cushion foundation and applying my mascara,” Connolly tells me proudly. “They had no idea who I was. The products had earned a place in their makeup bags.”

Actress Millie Bobbie Brown tells her Instagram followers how much she loves Cream Cushion Foundation

For Connolly, those small, unfiltered moments define her brand’s success, perhaps even more than the sell-out launches.

Before celebrities were pulling her compacts from their handbags, Connolly was shipping orders from her kitchen table and cold-emailing manufacturers, who kept saying no. She started the business while at university, having saved 10,000 Euros while working as a makeup artist alongside her studies – and she is still self-funded.

Now 33, she lives in Dublin with her husband John, leads a 135-person team spread across Ireland, the UK and South Korea, sells her products in nearly 600 stores worldwide, including in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and reaches 68 countries via her e-commerce sites. According to the Irish Times, the company grew its revenue by nearly 50 per cent in 2024 to €32.6 million.

And she’s not done yet. Connolly has ambitions to become one of the world’s top 10 beauty brands globally in the next few years.

Here’s how she does it…

My lightbulb moment

As a 16-year-old from Ireland working weekends on an Urban Decay beauty counter, Connolly saw the overwhelm around buying makeup: “People would come in and say, ‘Hi, I’m looking for a powder.’ And I’d say, ‘Sure, we have 62 options, what would you like?’ You could just see the birds flying over their head.”

Then, juggling jobs as a makeup artist with her studies (Business and French at University College Dublin), she was all set to become a teacher. But as her experience as a makeup artist grew, that passion for education came to life in a slightly different way. She set up The Academy, a makeup school to train aspiring makeup artists and to help women feel more confident in perfecting their own faces by offering streamlined products and time-saving techniques.

Left: Connolly began her beauty career at 16 working on the Urban Decay counter. Right: her first business – a makeup academy

“People were overloaded by information and by products,” she says. “Everything was so overcomplicated, and my natural ethos was, ‘you don’t need half those products, you don’t need half that time, and you can feel amazing in five minutes’.”

“Sculpting was hugely overcomplicated at the time. It was two-hour YouTube tutorials and 16 brushes,” Connolly explains. “I wasn’t saying that was wrong, but I was saying you don’t have to do that.”

By the time she graduated, Connolly was clear on her goal: “I thought, let’s mix business and beauty, but do it around simplification. That’s the brand,” she explains.

“Now, the brand name has evolved to encompass more than just cheekbones. It’s about sculpting or creating the best version of you. We’re here to help you feel like your best self, whatever that looks like.”

How I turned my idea into a reality

As a makeup artist, Connolly was known for a particular look,  a combination of prep, base and subtle sculpting that looked glowy and defined without taking hours to perfect. People began to recognise it from her work on TV and shoots.

The right brush was everything, so, product-wise, that’s where she started, with a double-ended sculpting brush, ergonomically shaped to easily recreate the five-minute sculpt, followed by a three-step palette for blush, highlighter and contour.

Lying on her bed in her final year of studying, she Googled manufacturers in Europe, sent dozens of emails, and got lots of ‘no’s… but one ‘maybe’.

“I said, ‘Great, I’ll see you on Friday, I’m on the way to Manchester,’” Connolly laughs. “I wasn’t in a position where money could come from family. I’m a good saver when there’s a bigger goal. I knew the investment in product was where I had to spend my money.”

Aimee’s original palette and brush (left) and (right) packing orders from home

With her first two products on the manufacturing line, she embarked on a self-taught crash course in freight, customs, storage units, packaging design and getting to know the local post lady while shipping orders from the kitchen table. “I’d be making phone calls pretending I worked for a company, asking, ‘Say hypothetically if I had a container dropping in, what would I need to do?’ People were actually so helpful.”

Another of Connolly’s early products was her Beauty Base, which launched in Ireland in 2019. It was a skincare-first complexion product that felt like skin, but performed like makeup and had SPF. Her first attempt to find a close-to-home European formulator for it stalled: “We couldn’t get the glow that I wanted at the level of broad-spectrum SPF, while making it moisturising.”

Despite being a tiny brand, she headed to South Korea, having discovered the expertise of Korean formulation houses a decade ahead of the K-beauty explosion for Western consumers. “Korea perfected the formula on round three. They were just a different level in terms of innovation,” she says.

Organising delivery of the product from South Korea to Ireland was just another challenge Connolly took in her stride and South Korea is still an important part of Sculpted By Aimee’s product manufacturing structure today.

Connolly with the development team in South Korea

It was an unconventional route for a young, self-funded founder, not least because she was initially advised to launch lower-commitment products, such as lipsticks or trend-led items, that don’t require deep trust to fly off the shelves.

“It probably speaks to my mission as a makeup artist,” Connolly says. “I wanted really trusted, credible products – the literal foundations of your makeup bag. We’re not a trend-led brand. We’re the ones you come back to; the things you know will make you feel great in a couple of minutes.”

Using a direct-to-consumer model that’s tried-and-tested for modern beauty start-ups, the Sculpted By Aimee products were initially stocked only on the brand’s website. Soon, it expanded into independent retailers in Ireland when popularity grew. Then, in 2022, Sculpted By Aimee became the first-ever Irish cosmetics brand to open a flagship store on Dublin’s prestigious Grafton Street (she now has four standalone stores in Ireland). Expansion into the UK quickly followed.

“I’ll often say to my in-store teams, although we need sales, my biggest priority is that our customers leave feeling amazing. That might mean spending extra time solving a customer’s problem, giving someone a sample to take home instead of pushing a sale, or simply creating a calm, non-judgmental space. I always say, ‘If you make no money that day, I’d rather that, because if someone leaves happy, they’ll tell 10 friends’. Prioritise the experience. The sales will come naturally once the experience is right.”

How I really feel about going viral

It’s an approach that’s certainly working, and while Connolly feels like success is a series of highlights rather than one ‘made it’ moment, launching into the UK market – including into Selfridges, London in 2024 – was a turning point. “It was a huge step change – coming out of our cosy domestic home in Ireland and branching across the water. Being welcomed there was a real ‘okay, this is bigger now’ moment.”

However, it was the launch of the Cream Cushion foundation in 2025 that really put Sculpted By Aimee on the global stage. An easy-to-use, touch-up-friendly compact, it consistently sells out.

“We launched and had probably the most organic social mentions in a short space of time we’ve ever had,” Connolly says. “Still, I was so surprised when we sold out. I never truly understood the stress and joy of a viral product until that launch. It was the best problem anyone could have. It’s brought so much joy and expanded us into so many conversations.”

As the brand has scaled, comparisons to other makeup artists like Charlotte Tilbury have inevitably followed, too, but Aimee takes it all in her stride. “You can’t help but feel inspired by another female who’s carved such a monumental route for herself,” she says.

“The comparison wasn’t driven by us, but people started saying, ‘This is like or better than a Charlotte Tilbury at X price.’ Every brand is different, with its own customer in mind, but I don’t hate those comparisons.”

London calling: Sculpted By Aimee’s launch into Selfridges in 2024

On self-funding her dreams

Even more impressively, Aimee has grown Sculpted By Aimee to this point without external investors. “We’re still privately owned,” she confirms, although she’s not closed to the idea entirely.

“I have no regrets we haven’t taken investment so far – it’s meant I can make the decisions I feel are best for the long-term brand. But our ambitions are big: we want to be in the top 10 beauty brands globally in the next 10 years. That requires scale, new geographies, product innovation, and capital. There also aren’t enough female-founded and female-invested companies. I think I have a role to play in that space – whether by taking investment one day, being at the table as an investor myself, or mentoring other founders.”

Connolly’s long-term goal? Makeup bags filled with Sculpted By Aimee around the world, helped by heavy investment in evolving the brand’s visual identity. “I’m confident we can do it – it’ll just be a massive task.”

My productivity hack

“I make lists upon lists upon lists. I live a very ‘pack, unpack, repack’ lifestyle. My Notes app is full of packing lists. It takes the brain power out of it – I just throw everything into a bag and go.”

Flying is my creative time

“My team gets nervous when I get on a plane. I’ll land with a note titled ‘Aimee’s Plane Thoughts’ and 62 new ideas. We recently had a call about partnering more deeply with a cosmetology company – that started life as a plane thought.”

I keep myself sane by…

Moving! “I love exercise – if I have a week without it, I’m just not myself. I schedule workouts like meetings into my week: a walk before work, a Pilates class near where I’m going, or a run after. I really make it my mission to slot it in so it doesn’t get forgotten.”

Why family and friends come first

“I like to be busy on all fronts – personally, professionally, socially. I’m definitely a people person. I don’t mind working lots of days in a row if I can then take a weekend to explore a city or have cocktails like a Hugo Spritz with friends.”

3 things you’ll always find on my desk

“My laptop, wired earphones, and my phone. I don’t have fancy screens. I’ll take a meeting anywhere – in an Uber, on a Tube, walking down the street. And there will always be tea, any kind of chocolate, and a lip product on the desk. I could live on tea, chocolate and lip balm quite happily.”

3 pieces of advice for you

• Listen to your gut. “I can’t underestimate how mu ch my gut has carried me. As a founder, you inherently know your business better than anyone. You might not be an expert in every subject – and you should absolutely lean on experts – but if something feels wrong, there’s a reason. Don’t ignore it.”
• Know your ‘why’. “We’ve never lived in a busier world. That’s not a reason not to start – it just means you need to be crystal clear on your ‘why’. If you go in front of a buyer, you have to know why they should take your brand over someone else.”
• Remember the joy. “Founders tend to always move the goalposts. What we’re doing now would’ve been the dream a few years ago, but your mind moves the target. It’s part of the ambition that fuels you, but I need to remind myself – and the team – to stop and celebrate the wins. At the end of the day, we’re in the fluffier side of the world – but we have the power to make someone’s morning better. If someone leaves our store or puts on our products and feels like the most confident version of themselves, that’s the whole point.”