Tarte Cosmetics’ multifranchise concealer empire is gaining a new, skin care-infused entrant.
The 25-year-old brand is inaugurating its Creaseless Creamy Concealer, a lighter-coverage counterpart to the brand’s Creaseless Concealer, which launched in 2011. Retailing for $30 and developed over 18 months, the new product is said to have 59 percent skin care ingredients, with a blend of cloudberry, caffeine, bakuchiol, niacinamide, aloe and the brand’s signature maracujá passion fruit.
“It’s the most skin care-infused concealer we’ve done,” said Tarte founder and chief executive officer Maureen Kelly. “As a social-first brand, we’re always listening to our consumers — one of the number-one things we’ve heard was that they’re looking for a [lightweight] creaseless concealer that was full coverage.”
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Concealer is a major business for Tarte, which Circana reports is the number-one concealer brand in the U.S. prestige market. At Ulta Beauty, Tarte’s Shape Tape concealer franchise is the retailer’s top-selling product in prestige cosmetics, the retailer confirmed to WWD.
With this launch, the brand aims to further its foothold in the category, rolling the offering out to 3,000 Ulta and Sephora doors; online in 55 countries, and on TikTok Shop — where Tarte’s livestream shopping revenue has grown more than five times during the second quarter.
In an aim to ensure shade diversity commensurate with that of the brand’s consumer base — a standard not yet wholly exemplified by makeup players, as recently demonstrated by a viral Youthforia skin tint controversy in May, which led to widespread consumer fallout and prompted Revolve to drop the brand from its assortment — Tarte, which endured a shade diversity reckoning of its own in the late 2010s, consulted with celebrity makeup artist and shade expert Michela Wariebi while developing Creaseless Creamy Concealer.
“The result of this work is that the shade and undertone range is what we believe to be one of the most inclusive in the industry,” said Kelly, adding that 70 percent of the concealer’s 34 shades “fall within the tan-to-deep spectrum.” The brand is also inaugurating a sixth undertone targeting deep skin tones to its existing five-undertone lineup with this launch, which will be added to the original Creaseless Concealer formula, as well.
Though Tarte has managed to shorten its average product development timeline to less than one year as it seeks to serve up a steady stream of newness, taking a slower approach for this launch was a strategic decision. “We kind of had to slow down to go fast; we knew that if we were going to launch a new concealer, it had to live up to that number-one caliber,” Kelly said. “We took that time to hold those internal and external focus groups, make sure every shade was tested, scrape the internet [for feedback] using AI — pulling it all together.”
To commemorate the launch as well as Tarte’s 25th anniversary, the brand’s 25-city “kindness” pop-up tour will come to New York — where Kelly founded the brand in her former Lower East Side apartment in July 1999.
Activations at the pop-up and marketing efforts for the concealer will center around mindfulness, among them a VIP mailer being seeded to 250 influencers which features an iPad equipped with guided meditations and pilates classes.
“We’re focusing on the summer of self care,” said Kelly, adding that 1 percent of all direct-to-consumer sales of the concealer made through Aug. 31 will go toward one of four mental health organizations of a customer’s choosing, among them the Asian Mental Health Collective and Mindfulness First.