Anastasia Beverly Hills
Anastasia Soare arrived in Los Angeles from Romania in 1989 and was told brows were not a market. She built the category from scratch and by 2018 her brand was valued at $3 billion. In December 2025 she put $225 million of her own money in to buy it back from leveraged debt.
In 1992, Anastasia Soare rented a single room inside a Beverly Hills salon to do eyebrows. The salon’s manager had told her there was no market for it. Three years earlier she had landed in Los Angeles from Romania, where she had been waiting since 1986 for permission to follow her husband Victor, a ship’s captain who had walked into the US embassy in Italy and asked for asylum. She spoke very little English and was working as an aesthetician at the salon she now wanted to leave to take her shot at brows alone.
By 1997 she had her own salon on Bedford Drive. Her first two brow clients were Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell, brought in by word of mouth, and her appointment book within a few years included Madonna, Oprah, Sharon Stone, Faye Dunaway, and Jennifer Lopez. By 2018, Anastasia Beverly Hills was generating roughly $340 million in revenue with $175 million in EBITDA, and TPG Capital paid about $600 million for a 38 percent stake at a $3 billion valuation.
By December 2025, the same company had collapsed under TPG’s debt. Soare personally injected $225 million in equity to recapitalize, took her ownership back to 55 percent, and watched TPG’s stake get written down to 6 percent. The company she invented in a rented room ended up being saved by the only person who had ever believed it was a category in the first place.
At a glance:
| Founded | 1992 (salon), 2000 (product line), Beverly Hills, California |
| Founder | Anastasia Soare |
| President | Claudia “Norvina” Soare (daughter, since 2016) |
| 2017 revenue | ~$340M with ~$175M EBITDA |
| TPG investment (May 2018) | ~$600M for ~38% stake at ~$3B valuation |
| Hero products | Brow Wiz, Dipbrow Pomade, Modern Renaissance Palette, Soft Glam |
| Distribution | ~2,000 stores; Sephora, Ulta, Dillard’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom |
| 2023 revenue | ~$240M |
| Dec 2025 recap | Soare injected $225M equity; ownership: Soare 55%, lenders 39%, TPG 6% |
| Forbes net worth peak | $1.2B (2019) |
The Story
A Romanian asylum case and a brow nobody cared about
Soare was born in 1957 in Constanța, Romania, the daughter of two tailors, and studied art history and architecture before training as an aesthetician. Her husband Victor walked into the US embassy in Italy in 1986 and asked for asylum, then waited six months for clearance and another three years for Anastasia and their daughter Claudia to be allowed out of Ceaușescu’s Romania. The family reunited in Los Angeles in 1989.
She found work as an aesthetician in a Beverly Hills salon, doing facials and waxing for clients who came in weekly. The salon’s manager told her she could not specialize in brows because there was no market for the service in the United States. In 1992 she rented a room of her own and started taking only brow clients, applying a method she had taught herself from her Romanian art history training, which mapped the brow’s start, arch, and end to the bone structure of the face using Leonardo da Vinci’s golden ratio.
She later patented the technique. The clients who came in for it were not looking for a cosmetic service, they were looking for a face that worked, and she gave them one shape they could grow back to for the rest of their lives.
Cindy Crawford walks in, and the salon becomes a list
Crawford was Soare’s first major brow client, followed quickly by Naomi Campbell. Word moved through the modeling and acting circuits in Los Angeles the way it always does, and within a few years Soare’s appointment book read like an awards-show seating chart, with Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Sharon Stone, Faye Dunaway, Jennifer Lopez, and later Michelle Obama and Kim Kardashian among her regular clients.
In 1997 she opened the flagship Anastasia Salon on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, which still operates today. The salon’s reputation was the marketing engine, and print magazines covered her clients’ brows for a decade before she ever launched a product. By the time she released her first brow powder duo in 2000, she had a customer base that would buy anything she put her name on.
Brow Wiz, the pencil that became her signature SKU for over a decade, was on shelves by 2010, and the Dipbrow Pomade followed in 2014, just as Instagram was making sharp, defined brows a defining beauty look of the 2010s.
Modern Renaissance and the most-liked beauty brand on Instagram
In 2016, ABH launched the Modern Renaissance Palette, fourteen warm, berry-toned eyeshadow shades that pulled the entire industry away from cool neutrals. The launch was seeded almost entirely through beauty bloggers Jaclyn Hill, NikkieTutorials, and KathleenLights instead of traditional press, and Modern Renaissance became one of the bestselling palettes of 2016 on the strength of YouTube tutorials alone.
By 2017, ABH had become the most-liked beauty brand on Instagram, with engagement equal to the combined interactions of Tarte, Benefit, NYX, MAC, and Too Faced. By 2018 the account had 17 million followers, and Soare credited her daughter Claudia, who had joined the business in 2012 and become president in 2016, with running the influencer strategy that built it.
That same year, sales had compounded at roughly 64 percent annually for four years, ABH was generating around $340 million in revenue with $175 million in EBITDA, and TPG Capital paid $600 million for a 38 percent stake.
The Strategy
A category invented from a ratio
Brows were not a category in American beauty in the early 1990s. Most women either plucked them at home or had them waxed at a salon as part of a general grooming service. Soare turned brow shaping into its own appointment, with its own price tag, performed by a specialist trained in a specific method. The Golden Ratio gave the service the aura of expertise that justified the cost, and the patent gave her competitive cover for fifteen years.
The product line followed the same logic. The early SKUs were not designed to be tried by the curious, they were designed to give existing clients a way to maintain her work between salon appointments, which meant the brand could charge a premium for them and still sell out.
Influencers as friends, not vendors
Soare’s stance on paid influencer marketing was on record by 2017: “Influencers are my friends. We don’t pay friends. We send them products, and whatever they like, they post.” ABH was one of the earliest beauty brands to seed product to micro and mid-tier YouTubers and Instagrammers without a paid contract, in a period when most legacy beauty brands were still buying full-page magazine ads.
The hashtag #ABHBrows became a UGC engine that fed back into the brand’s main account, and by the time competitors caught on, ABH had built a relationship with the beauty creator economy that Estée Lauder and L’Oréal could not buy with cash.
Norvina takes the front office
Claudia Soare went by Norvina online from her early teens. She joined the company at the salon front desk, moved into marketing and corporate sales, and took over the makeup side in 2012. By 2016 she was president of ABH, and she became the public face of the brand on Instagram in a way her mother never was.
The succession also became the single most contested decision of the second decade. Loyal customers pushed back as Norvina pushed the brand into faster, lower-price drops to chase Gen Z, and beauty industry analysts later argued the move ceded the prestige positioning that had made ABH a $3 billion company in the first place.
The Marketing
17 million followers and a tagged-photo flywheel
ABH’s Instagram strategy ran on volume and reposts. The brand posted multiple times a day, almost always reposting customer brows tagged #ABHBrows, which gave every customer a reason to tag the brand and a non-zero chance of being featured in front of millions of accounts. By 2018 the account had 17 million followers and was the most-liked beauty brand on the platform.
The flywheel worked because every reposted brow was both a piece of free advertising and a piece of social proof for the Golden Ratio method, which made the customer the campaign.
Modern Renaissance, sold by influencer, not by ad
The Modern Renaissance launch in 2016 set the template for how ABH released every major palette afterward. Press samples went to beauty creators first, with embargoes that allowed YouTube tutorials to drop in coordinated waves rather than scatter across a launch month. Jaclyn Hill, NikkieTutorials, and KathleenLights all reviewed the palette in the first weeks, and the tutorials drove sales without a single magazine ad.
The palette went on to be cited as one of the products that defined 2016 makeup, and ABH used the same playbook for Soft Glam in 2018 and the Norvina Pro Pigment palettes from 2019 onward.
The Numbers
| Year | Revenue | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2014–2017 | ~64% YoY growth | Pre-TPG compounding |
| 2017 | ~$340M | $175M EBITDA, peak |
| 2018 | $3B valuation | TPG buys 38% for ~$600M |
| 2023 | ~$240M | Q3 sales fell 12% YoY |
| 2025 | ~$500M valuation | Forbes estimate, recapitalized December |
TPG’s $600 million bought a 38 percent stake at a $3 billion valuation, and the deal was structured with debt taken on by ABH plus preferred shares for TPG. By 2020, Fitch had downgraded the company to junk on the basis that the capital structure was unsustainable. Revenue declined for five straight years, EBITDA fell roughly 77 percent from peak, and ABH missed loan payments before entering forbearance.
In December 2025, Soare closed an out-of-court recapitalization. She personally injected $225 million in equity, a new $272 million first-lien term loan replaced more than $600 million in prior debt, and TPG’s stake was wiped down to 6 percent. The founder ended up owning 55 percent of the brand she had started in 1992.
Controversies
The Subculture Palette refund cycle
In August 2017, ABH released the Subculture Palette as the warm-toned follow-up to Modern Renaissance and shipped it with a powdery, hard-to-blend formula and significant fallout. Beauty creators who had built audiences on Modern Renaissance reviewed it negatively at a roughly 25 to 1 ratio, and Norvina publicly acknowledged the formula issues and offered refunds through customer service. ABH attributed the problem to a new automatic pressing machine, and the palette is still cited as a benchmark formula failure for a prestige beauty brand.
Luminous Foundation and the post-Fenty shade question
ABH released its Luminous Foundation in 2017 with 25 shades, the same year Fenty Beauty had launched with 40 and reset the inclusivity standard for the entire beauty industry. Black beauty publications criticized the range as out of step with where the category had moved, and ABH later expanded the line. The criticism arrived as ABH was trying to pivot from a brow specialist into a full-face brand, and the gap pinned a question to that pivot the brand never fully answered.
The TPG debt collapse
The 2018 TPG deal financed itself with debt that ABH had to service out of operating cash flow, and when revenue declined for five consecutive years, the structure broke. Fitch downgraded the company to junk in 2020 on an unsustainable capital structure, EBITDA fell about 77 percent from its 2017 peak, and ABH missed loan payments before entering forbearance with its lenders. By the time the December 2025 recapitalization closed, TPG’s $600 million had been written down to a 6 percent stake.
What You Can Learn
Categories can be invented out of craft expertise. Soare did not invent the eyebrow. She invented the appointment, the price, the method, and the brand around it, by taking a service that had no market in the United States and turning it into a specialist’s chair with a patent on the technique. The same pattern repeats in any category that started as a generalist’s afterthought, from blowouts at Drybar to lash extensions, where the founder’s edge is teaching the customer that the thing she did at home for free is a discipline worth paying for.
Taking growth capital at peak revenue is a structural bet, not a windfall. TPG paid $600 million in 2018 for 38 percent of ABH at peak revenue and peak EBITDA, and the deal was financed with debt the company had to service out of operating cash flow. When revenue declined, the debt did not, and the structure forced the kind of cost cuts and faster product drops that diluted the brand. The 2025 recap wrote TPG’s stake down to 6 percent and put Soare back in majority control. A high valuation is a snapshot, not a balance sheet.
Founder-led brands need succession that protects the original positioning. Norvina took over the front office in 2016 with a strategy designed for the next generation of beauty consumers, which is the right instinct for any category that turns over every five years. The execution pulled ABH downmarket faster than its prestige distribution could absorb, and the brand ended up competing with mass beauty while carrying a luxury cost structure. Succession that hands the next generation the reins also has to define what they are not allowed to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Anastasia Beverly Hills?
Anastasia Soare, a Romanian-born aesthetician who immigrated to Los Angeles in 1989, founded the brand in 1992 by renting a single room in a Beverly Hills salon to specialize in eyebrow shaping. She opened her flagship salon on Bedford Drive in 1997, launched her first product line in 2000, and grew the company into a brand valued at $3 billion by 2018.
What is the Golden Ratio brow technique?
The Golden Ratio is Soare’s patented method for shaping eyebrows according to a client’s bone structure, using the same proportional ratios from Leonardo da Vinci’s work that she studied during art history training in Romania. The method maps the start, arch, and end of the brow to fixed points on the face, which gives clients a shape they can maintain and regrow to for life.
How much did TPG pay for Anastasia Beverly Hills?
TPG Capital paid approximately $600 million in May 2018 for a roughly 38 percent stake in ABH at a $3 billion valuation. By December 2025, after five years of revenue decline and a Fitch junk-rating downgrade, TPG’s stake had been written down to 6 percent in an out-of-court recapitalization that Anastasia Soare personally backed with $225 million in equity.
Who runs Anastasia Beverly Hills now?
Anastasia Soare remains CEO and majority owner with 55 percent ownership after the December 2025 recapitalization. Her daughter Claudia Soare, known publicly as Norvina, has been president of the company since 2016 and runs day-to-day operations and creative direction.
Why did the TPG investment fail?
The 2018 deal was financed in part with debt that ABH had to service out of operating cash flow. When revenue declined for five consecutive years and EBITDA fell roughly 77 percent from its 2017 peak, the company could not service the debt structure, and Fitch downgraded the company to junk in 2020. By 2025, missed payments and forbearance forced a recapitalization that wiped most of TPG’s investment.
Who owns Anastasia Beverly Hills?
Anastasia Soare owns 55 percent of the company following the December 2025 recapitalization, with lenders holding 39 percent and TPG Capital reduced to 6 percent. Soare personally injected $225 million in equity to take the brand back from leveraged debt.
When was Anastasia Beverly Hills founded?
Anastasia Soare opened her first brow-only studio inside a Beverly Hills salon in 1992. The flagship salon on Bedford Drive opened in 1997, and the product line launched in 2000 with a brow powder duo.
What is Anastasia Soare’s net worth?
Forbes estimated Anastasia Soare’s net worth at $1.2 billion in 2019, when she was recognized as one of the wealthiest self-made women in America. The figure has fallen since the company’s revenue decline, though the December 2025 recapitalization restored her to majority ownership.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Anastasia Soare”. Founder background, immigration timeline, salon history.
- Wikipedia, “Anastasia Beverly Hills”. Product launches, distribution, company milestones.
- LA Magazine, “Anastasia Soare and the Golden Ratio Beauty Empire”. Golden Ratio methodology and patent.
- WWD, “Anastasia Beverly Hills Celebrates 20 Years”. Salon history and early celebrity clients.
- WWD, “Anastasia Beverly Hills Instagram”. Instagram dominance and follower data.
- CNBC, “TPG Capital Nears Stake in Anastasia Beverly Hills,” May 2018. Pre-TPG growth rate and deal terms.
- BeautyMatter, “TPG Capital Makes Minority Investment in Anastasia Beverly Hills”. 2018 deal structure.
- BeautyMatter, “TPG Suffers $600 Million Loss on Anastasia Beverly Hills”. Post-recap cap table and TPG writedown.
- PR Newswire, “Anastasia Beverly Hills Completes Recapitalization Transaction”. December 2025 recap announcement.
- Ropes & Gray, “Anastasia Beverly Hills Completes Recapitalization From Founder and CEO Anastasia Soare”. New term loan terms and equity injection.
- Business of Fashion, “Anastasia Beverly Hills Owner Injects $225 Million Into Brand”. Recap details and ownership split.
- In My Kit, “A $600 Million Fail: Inside TPG’s Catastrophic Bet”. EBITDA decline, follower growth, brand-dilution analysis.
- Forbes, “Anastasia Soare profile”. Net worth history and 2023 valuation estimate.
- Bouge & Rouge, “Subculturegate”. Subculture Palette controversy and refund cycle.
- Black Beauty Founders, “Anastasia Beverly Hills Faces Criticism Over Limited Shade Range”. Luminous Foundation shade-range criticism.