Beauty veteran Vimi Joshi can do a smoky eye with her eyes closed

Your no-makeup makeup and clean-girl aesthetic have no sway on Vimi Joshi. The M.A.C makeup veteran and newly minted beauty brand founder loves her jet-black liner, preferably arched to perfection, and a bright lip. When I hop on a video call for our interview, her flawless base manages to somehow radiate even through my dusty laptop screen.

We’re chatting because nine months ago the makeup artist launched Vimi Joshi Beauty—a brand that was founded on the belief that makeup can be joyful and personal. Following in the business-savvy footsteps of fellow artists like Charlotte Tilbury and Mario Dedivanovic, Joshi has poured three decades of industry experience into creating eyeshadow and lip and cheek pigments that complement the nuances of south Asian skin tones. Take Chai, a rusty orange shade for example, which she formulated because she couldn’t find a single orange lipstick that didn’t look borderline scary on us.

“I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup when I was younger, which only made me want to do it more. Every Sunday afternoon, my family and I would watch an ’80s Bollywood movie and I would obsess over the glamourous makeup of actors like Sridevi, Zeenat Aman, Rekha, and Helen,” she tells me excitedly from Dubai. This lifelong fascination with old-school glam was honed over 21 years at M.A.C cosmetics, where she started as a store manager before rising to the ranks of a global senior artist. Joshi’s CV is a recruiter’s dream: she started her career at MTV UK, expanded M.A.C across west Asia and India, worked backstage at the international fashion show circuit and with the Kuwaiti royal family, and headed makeup artistry at the IIFA Awards for a decade. Phew.

Below, we chat with Joshi about what inspired her to finally start a brand of her own, being one of the first south Asian makeup artists to work backstage during fashion week in the aughts, and how she’s reclaiming a word that was once used to shame her skin colour:

Where did the idea for Vimi Joshi, the brand, begin?

Whenever it came to lighter skin tones, I could find a shade immediately. The minute it came to south Asian, Latino, Mediterranean or Middle Eastern skin tones, it was a challenge. I would look at seemingly pigmented eyeshadows, put them on my skin, and it wouldn’t read at all. I would see a lipstick and go ‘I love this colour’ and it looked beautiful in the bullet but it looked washed out when I put it on. Our warm undertones were clearly missing.

When I was at M.A.C, Mickey Contractor and I developed a couple of shades of foundation and concealers especially for the south Asian skin tone, and everybody loved them. The shades were spot on. I knew then that it’s not just the undertone, it’s how the colors read on the skin. That’s when I decided to launch my own brand.

What products did you decide to launch with?

We launched at the end of January 2026 as the first south Asian beauty brand at Ulta Beauty Middle East. We’ve started with what I call the essential eight. What’s the one thing Indian women are known for? The eyes. Poetry has been written about the eyes. So, we’ve got two eye palettes, a mascara, an eyeliner, and two colour pencils—a jet-black one called Kali and a rich chocolate brown called Tera (because I made it for you).

How long was Vimi Joshi Beauty in the making?

Five years of research and product development. I started right in the middle of the [Covid-19] pandemic and the queue to get into factories in Germany and Italy was 18 months. That’s when I had a call with an ex-colleague, Jennifer Balbier, M.A.C’s former senior vice president of global product development. When I told her I’m launching my brand, she wanted to help; she’s been dealing with factories all around the world. I managed to get in with investors, and we had dedicated labs with chemists working closely with us to nail the formulation.

I imagine choosing makeup artistry was a very unconventional career choice, particularly all those years ago. How did your desi family react?

M.A.C was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I am who I am because of it and I will always be a M.A.C girl. But for the longest time, my parents had no clue what I was doing; they thought I was tweezing eyebrows or waxing. It’s only when I showed them a talent’s makeup on the cover of a magazine or took them to see the IIFA Awards, where they saw the dancers’ and celebrities’ makeup, that they understood what a makeup artist was.

What was it like working backstage at fashion weeks in the early aughts?

I was one of the few, if not the first, south Asian makeup artist working backstage in 2003. There would always be a lead—often world-famous makeup artists with their own brands—who would come up to me and say, “Do you mind doing the Brazilian girl or the Mediterranean girl’s makeup?”

They asked me to do that because they knew I would understand those undertones the best and do justice to it. Even the Latino models would come and ask me to work with them. The girls knew that I had the foundation shades that they wanted, which no one else had in their kit.

Have you ever experienced colourism personally or in your line of work?

I called my kohl eye pencil Kali because, growing up, relatives called me Kali. Meanwhile my sister, who is fair-skinned, was called Gori. I knew it was derogatory at the time, but as a child you don’t think too much about it. And the fact that it still exists! I’ve been asked to apply [foundation] one shade lighter even if it looks blue-grey on them. They’d rather be blue-grey than a darker shade.

What is a makeup trend that you will always be on board with?

Black smoky eyes—I can do it with my eyes closed. And a red lip, black liner, and big hair. I believe in sexy, feminine makeup.

And what do you have on today?

Vimi Joshi Beauty’s lip and cheek stick in the shade Red Bindi, which is a classic red. And Kali, of course.