Lawless Beauty’s fan-favorite Forget the Filler franchise is gaining its first complexion product.
The line, which is estimated by industry sources to exceed $30 million in annual sales, debuted in 2020 with the launch of its Lip-plumping Line-smoothing Gloss, an early contender in the skin care-infused makeup game.
It has since expanded to include other lip offerings — liners, masks and a particularly TikTok-loved balm tint — also adding a facial moisturizer in 2023.
Now founder Annie Lawless is looking to bring the line’s purportedly skin-smoothing capabilities to the complexion category, introducing a foundation that emphasizes both coverage and skin care benefits at once.
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“We think this is a great time to launch a fuller coverage foundation,” said Lawless, who introduced her clean beauty brand in 2017 after stepping away from Suja Life, the pressed juice company she cofounded in 2012. “We’ve been in the ‘clean girl, ‘no-makeup makeup’ aesthetic for some time and it feels like this year, makeup is really coming back.”
Retailing for $43, the Forget the Filler Skin-plumping Line-smoothing Foundation marks “the culmination of this new formulation approach we’ve adopted since introducing Forget the Filler. This is our, ‘OK — we’re not messing around — we’ve arrived as a skin care makeup brand that is glam, full-coverage, high-performance, and we aren’t sacrificing on any of those pillars,’” Lawless continued.
Available in 33 shades, the $43 offering features the same Maxi-Youth complex Lawless tapped for its earlier Forget the Filler moisturizer. Powered by fermented hyaluronic acid, that complex aims to replicate the texture-smoothing benefits of Sederma’s Max-Lip ingredient — used in many lip treatment products, including those by Lawless — but for the face.
“The [foundation] took two years to develop, because in formulating with Maxi-Youth at efficacy levels, the foundation would either become too oily, too thin, too slippy — we had to develop it from scratch,” said Lawless, adding the foundation is 40 percent composed of skin care ingredients, including infusions of glycerin and vitamin E.
“We wanted to create a foundation that gives the coverage of an Estée Lauder Double Wear; the lightweight feel of an Armani Beauty Luminous Silk, but also the non-acnegenic qualities of a Clinique or an It Cosmetics foundation — all rolled into one,” said Lawless.
The product will be available direct-to-consumer and at Sephora, where Lawless sells in all doors. When Lawless launched online at Sephora in 2018, it was one of the first makeup brands to nab the retailer’s “clean at Sephora” seal.
Today the brand looks to broaden its mission while staying rooted in its clean beauty origins, creating makeup formulas that “have a heavy emphasis on skin care, but are also created by someone who loves makeup and is not willing to sacrifice on the finish and wearability.”
“At our size, we have so much runway in terms of awareness; my goal is for every person who walks into Sephora to have a Forget the Filler gloss in their basket because it sets the tone for the types of products we offer — skin-loving formulas everyone can use and see benefits from,” said Lawless.
