bareMinerals

The loose powder predates the famous name by nearly two decades. In 1976, a shop owner named Diane Richardson opened a small store in Los Gatos, south of San Francisco, selling an all-natural powder by weight, marketed to soothe and conceal concerns like rosacea, scars and sensitive skin. It was a curiosity, not a phenomenon — until a product-development veteran took over the struggling business in the mid-1990s and recognized what she had inherited. Leslie Blodgett had cut her teeth in cosmetics product development at Neutrogena and then Max Factor, where she discovered a sharp eye for color and rose quickly from assistant to manager. She relaunched the powder line and bet the company's future on an unconventional sales channel. The origin story has since become industry folklore: watching the shopping network at two in the morning, she decided to pitch on air, bought a white suit and a cheap fake diamond ring for the occasion, and went live on August 30, 1997, moving tens of thousands of dollars of foundation that single day. She would spend roughly seventeen years selling on that channel, building a fanbase devoted enough to give themselves a nickname, long before social media made founder-customer intimacy a standard playbook. That direct, conversational relationship — not conventional advertising — drove the company to a major public offering in 2006. The marketing promise that the powder was pure enough to sleep in helped define what would later be branded 'clean beauty,' though the claim outran the dermatology; sleeping in any makeup remains inadvisable. Through later corporate reshuffles the brand lost some cultural momentum and retail footprint, but its core mineral foundations remain genuinely well-regarded for breakout-prone, reactive skin that struggles with heavier formulas.

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