Because Women Of All Colors Deserve to Celebrate Their Beauty: The Story Of Kim Roxie And LAMIK Beauty

The story of this woman who vowed to celebrate her color and from there moved on to create her own beauty empire is inspiring, to say the least. Kim Roxie’s LAMIK launched online in 2022, is now the first Black-owned clean makeup brand in Ulta Beauty. In a single line, LAMIK Beauty is a line of cosmetics that caters to women of color, made with fully natural and vegan ingredients. But it is also much more than that as its genesis is rooted in the blind eye cosmetic industry has turned to the skin of “other” colors.

The Beginning Kim Roxie’s Journey With LAMIK?

It all started at the age of 20 for Kim Roxie following her realization that the cosmetic industry had little to offer her and her dark-skinned tribe. Add to that a skin condition called alopecia that led her to lose her hair and her eyebrows, she felt let down by the companies that she turned to for a beauty uplift. Speaking to CBS News about her moment of realization, Roxie says:

“What was bugging me was that my beauty was not being celebrated. So as a dark-skinned woman who grew up in the South, in Houston Texas, the culture was around being lighter skinned…So I wanted to create something that celebrated me.”

As she attended school at Clark Atlanta University, she managed to get a part time job at a makeup counter to support herself financially.It was here that she got her first experience with makeup. And it was here, in her words, that she “had fallen in love with not just makeup but making people feel good about themselves.”

In 2004, she started her own beauty studio in her college apartment, which was later to become the ancestor to her makeup studio that she opened in a Houston mall with 500 dollars from her mother and the support of her sisters. According to Roxie, this was a place where women could get their makeup done, their lashes and eyebrows. Though she had to drum up customers from the food court of the mall, in no time she had become one of the most trusted and sought after beauticians in and around Houston. Perhaps not surprisingly, 75% of her customer base comprised Black women. Her focus was on brows and the beauty needs of black women. LAMIK had its incubation here in this modest beauty studio.

“I started Lamik because I suffered from Alopecia, and I couldn’t find anything on the market that catered to my needs. My clients are women like me who share similar stories of not feeling seen by the cosmetics industry,” says Roxie going back to a time when a 21-year old woman’s dream was still in its budding phase.

14 years down the line, Roxie had her own makeup inventory all lined up and was ready to go nationwide with “LAMIK” – Love and Makeup in Kindness abbreviated – her vision being to give women access to products not only catering to their skin tone, but assured safe, non-toxic and all natural. Her dream eventually gave rise to a phenomenal makeup line that later in 2022 made history.

LAMIK was launched online in March of 2022. When COVID hit the world, knocking shut many doors, Roxie was ready to open her avenues in the online world.

“Just like everybody else, I turned on my camera and went Facebook live”, says Roxie, who, then with her four-year-old daughter started pitching her products online. She demonstrated to her viewers how she created her eyebrows. Suffering from alopecia and having lost her brows, she showed real time her masterstroke of filling in her eyebrows from scratch to perfection, one deceivingly real and natural looking. Thus introducing her flagship product the “Revelation Brow Duo” – the brow kit that shaped her eyebrows and her entrepreneurship.

From then, LAMIK took off on its journey to redefine beauty, first selling their products online and then launching in major retailers. LAMIK or “Love in Makeup and Kindness” is both an acronym and an affirmation for Roxie and her customers. “I wanted every aspect of my company to be intentional, and just by saying the name, I hope that people can understand that beauty is more than skin deep.”

Roxie believes that her success was a win not just for her, but for every other small Black-owned business, proving before major corporations and retailers that they have buying power. Roxie explains her vision going forward:

“My aim in this space is to not only make the beauty industry more equitable on all levels, but also to make diversity in the clean beauty space so normalized that it becomes something that people don’t have to think about, but instead, come to expect.” This go-getter has hauled in the change that was long overdue in our long history of fighting for fair and equal accessibility across diversities.