Alix Earle Hates Skin Care. That’s Why She’s Launching a Skin Care Brand

TikTok’s Gen Z It Girl, who turned “get ready with me” videos into a growth engine for other brands, reveals exclusively to Inc. how she’s built her new startup Reale Actives.

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON

Alix Earle doesn’t like skin care. That’s what the 25-year-old influencer tells me one Tuesday afternoon this past December, sitting on a blue velvet couch in her Fifth Avenue Hotel suite to discuss the launch of Reale Actives, her skincare brand. Given the occasion for our conversation, she knows that sounds strange. But for Earle, who has built an audience of 14 million followers by being disarmingly candid on TikTok and Instagram, that kind of honesty is built into her brand.

“I just never had a good experience with skin care,” explains Earle, who became famous as a college student at the University of Miami posting TikTok videos of herself in her apartment, mostly getting ready to go out with her friends and chronicling her struggles with cystic acne. “That’s when it clicked for me.”

With her oversized blazer and the terrace windows behind her framing the Manhattan skyline, Earle looks every bit the Gen Z mogul. Listening to her explain her clear-eyed vision, she sounds it, too. After years of promoting other people’s brands, this was the white space she had been looking for to launch her own. In a classic founder tale, she is solving her own problem—a problem that she has been sharing with millions of people since the summer of 2022, when she says her acne was so bad that she cried multiple times a day and didn’t want to leave her house.

Plus, she already had a name: Reale. Earle came up with the word, which is an anagram of her last name and a nod towards the honesty she sees as core to her connection with her audience, back in August of 2023, before she even had an idea for a product on which to to stamp it.

By her own telling, Earle has spent the past two years “living this whole other secret life” developing Reale in startup stealth mode. Unlike other celebrity businesses, there was no brand incubator, just Earle interviewing dermatologists, recruiting a CEO, and hiring a team of five full-time employees and four consultants. Dr. Kiran Mian​, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City known for treating high-profile patients, signed on to consult. Andrea Blieden, an e-commerce and beauty veteran with past stints at Kiehl’s and the Body Shop, joined as CEO. Earle, of course, has been documenting everything.

In this exclusive story you’ll learn:

How Earle built Reale Actives more like a real startup than a celebrity side project—and why that distinction matters

The “Alix Earle effect” and why entrepreneurs like Poppi’s Allison Ellsworth and Gorgie’s Michelle Cordeiro Grant swear by it 

Earle’s reason for spending two years developing her brand almost entirely in secret, and how she kept her audience hooked anyway

What attracted the most A-list investor in the celebrity-backed brand space to invest in Reale Actives

Why Harvard Business School is studying her every move

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