beauty
SENSITIVE TOPIC
Maplewood’s Erin Williams makes clean beauty products in a health-conscious age
WRITTEN BY KAITLYN KANZLER
Erin Williams spent years
being skeptical of clean
beauty products. To her,
“clean beauty” brought
to mind nuts, berries
and coconut oil. She
never imagined that she would launch
aclean line of makeup and skincare
products. But here she is, atatime
when consumers are more concerned
about wellness than ever, producing
and selling afull range ofhealth-pro-
tecting products — for example, the
popular Peptide SPF 30, acombined
anti aging serum, lightweight moisturizer
and SPF 30 sunscreen.
“The criticism of cleaner brands is
that they don’t perform very well,”
she says. But her Erin’s Faces line of
skincare and makeup, available at
erinsfaces.com, proves that this isn’t
true, she says.
Williams originally hailed from
Texas and moved to New York to
pursue theater. In between stints of
performing in shows, she worked the
makeup counters before moving on
to provide the service in the flashy
world ofrunway shows and red
carpets.
But she missed working with
the women she met at the makeup
counters.
HAVING A PURPOSE
It was February 2011 during
Fashion Week, and Williams was
working on a fashion show where
Beyoncé’s makeup artist was in
charge of the models’ cosmetics.
“We had worked really hard
“THE HOPE IS TO SHOWWE
ARE NOTALONE IN TERMS OF
BEAUTYORSELF-IMAGE.”
ERIN WILLIAMS
on these specific colored eyeliners,”
Williams says. “It was all very fancy
and all very serious and then everybody,
with one exception, got sent
down the runway with sunglasses.
She had been so meticulous in
checking everything and then no one
even saw anything we had done.”
Frustrated that someone as
talented as Beyoncés makeup
artist couldn’t get her own vision
expressed, Williams says she went
home and prayed for a purpose. “I
said Iwant to be useful and Iwant
what I’m going to do to matter,”
she says. During her prayers, the seed
of an idea began to grow.
MAKEUP GOOD ENOUGH FOR
FRIENDS
Nine months later, Williams
launched Erin’s Face out of her home
in Queens, New York. It started
off as a conventional beauty brand.
She says her awareness of clean
beauty originally extended only as
far as Bare Essentials, brands at
Whole Foods and Dr. Hauschka Skin
Care; no one she knew was using
clean beauty makeup in the runway
and red carpet kits provided to
makeup artists by event sponsors.
But as she began developing her
line, Williams learned more and more
about the ingredients that go into
conventional makeup and skincare.
“I take people buying my stuff super
seriously, and I want to be worthy
of them giving me their money,”
she says.
She decided she would shift
her conventional beauty line into
something clean. “Now that I know
[what’s in conventional makeup], I
can’t un-know it, and I certainly can’t
ask my friend to buy [that type] product
from me,” Williams says. Erin’s
Faces products are paraban-free,
cruelty-free, synthetic fragrance-free,
sulfate-free and phthalate (a substance
added to plastics)-free.
“I think what makes us unique
is my background working with
women every day on the floor, and
PORTRAIT: COURTESY OF ERIN’S FACES
22 MAY 2020 MILLBURN &SHORT HILLS MAGAZINE