Beauty

From the Front Desk to President: Norvina Soare on Growing Up Inside Anastasia Beverly Hills

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 14, 2026

There is a moment during my conversation with Claudia Norvina Soare when astrology unexpectedly enters the chat. We have been talking about the Anastasia Beverly Hills creative director and president’s creative instincts, specifically her tendency to resist whatever everyone else happens to be doing, when I stop her mid-answer to ask whether she has any Aquarius or Gemini placements. It is only half a joke. “My moon is in Aquarius,” she tells me. Of course it is. A few minutes earlier, while explaining how she separates her own taste from the products she develops for millions of other people, Soare had put it more plainly: “I just don’t want to be like everybody else,” she says. “But I respect and I like what everybody else is doing.” A few moments later, she offers an even simpler explanation. “Yeah. No, I’m just me.”

That instinct has followed Soare through much of her career. Better known to the beauty world simply as Norvina, she grew up inside the business her mother, Anastasia Soare, was slowly building in Beverly Hills, then eventually helped push it far beyond the eyebrow category that first put the company on the map. She championed social media when much of the traditional beauty establishment was still figuring out what Instagram was good for, moved into product development, and created Modern Renaissance, the 2016 eyeshadow palette that became one of the defining products of beauty’s YouTube era. Yet very little of it seems to have happened according to some carefully mapped-out plan.

“I don’t know if I necessarily knew. My mom was just like, ‘You’re doing this,’” she laughs when I ask when she realized she wanted to join the family business. “Luckily, I ended up liking it.”

Beauty had been around her for as long as she could remember. Before Anastasia Beverly Hills became Anastasia Beverly Hills, before millions of Instagram followers and Sephora shelves and the contouring craze and Dipbrow, there was their house, which Norvina remembers as something of an unofficial creative studio. Her mother had been an artist before entering beauty, and people were constantly coming through to make things. There were models, hairstylists, and makeup artists. There were costumes being made and shoots being staged. Weekends and evenings could turn into creative projects without much warning.

At the same time, Norvina watched her mother work with a relentlessness that would eventually become part of the family business philosophy. Anastasia would spend her days at the salon before traveling on weekends for personal appearances at Nordstrom, trying to convince customers of something that seems almost absurd in hindsight: eyebrows deserved their own products.

“She’d be in the salon morning till night, and then weekends she would travel and do personal appearances at Nordstrom to sell,” Norvina remembers. “But she was so passionate. It never felt like work for her. She was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing.’ But it was so small, she had to get the word out there and it predates Instagram or whatever, so there was no way to let the world know all at once.”

Norvina started working at her mother’s front desk at 15, taking shifts after school, during vacations and on Saturdays. By 18, she was working there full-time. There was little glamour involved. The salon was effectively financing the fledgling cosmetics business, meaning that if one went down, both could go with it. The front desk also became an unlikely education in human behavior. “You are faced with people face-to-face every day that you don’t know and you don’t have a choice. You can’t really hide behind a screen. You don’t get to pause and think about what you’re going to say,” she says.

From there, she tried sales and discovered she was terrible at it, mostly because she preferred talking to customers to actually selling them anything. Numbers were not exactly her calling either. Product, however, was different.

When an employee working closely with Anastasia on development left, her mother finally gave her a chance. Norvina remembers entering a laboratory around 2012 and experiencing something close to instant recognition. “I have never felt so complete as when I entered a lab,” she says. “I was like, ‘This is my world.’”

She learned product development in what she now considers an old-school way, working directly with chemists and beginning formulas from scratch instead of selecting from libraries of ready-made products. The appeal, surprisingly, was partly scientific. Norvina describes herself as analytical and extraordinarily patient, someone who likes discovering why something that should work on paper simply refuses to cooperate once it is sitting in a beaker.

“I like science. I like the process of cause and effect, and I’m really, really patient,” she says. “Sometimes it’s tricky, something won’t perform the way it’s supposed to. And if you know chemistry, it tells you that two plus two equals four, and you’re like, okay, but it doesn’t.”

That stubborn curiosity still governs the way she develops products today. She tells me she does not delegate the creative work and remains involved from conception through formula, shade development and packaging. It also explains Anastasia Beverly Hills’ newest lip launch, Kiss Theory, a glossy gel-balm hybrid available in 23 shades. The company describes the formula as combining hydration, pigment, and shine, but Norvina’s explanation for why it exists is considerably less polished: everyone kept telling her to make a lip balm, and she simply did not want to.

“Two, three years ago, everyone was doing lip oil and lip balm. You could not escape it,” she says. “And everyone was like, ‘You have to do a lip balm.’ I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to be the 250th person that launches a lip balm and a lip oil.’ I have a thing where I don’t like doing what everybody else does. It actually bothers me.”

Instead, she started wondering whether she could collapse the lipstick, balm, and gloss routine into one product. That meant repeatedly frustrating the lab with a formula that had to be pigmented enough to resemble lipstick, comfortable enough to behave like balm, and glossy enough to eliminate the need for another layer. Then came another problem: the packaging was too wide, causing the glossy formula to end up everywhere during application. Norvina decided the tube needed to become skinnier. That decision threw off the formula’s stability and delayed the launch by roughly a year.

Altogether, she estimates Kiss Theory took two or three years to develop. There is something almost charmingly incompatible about that timeline and the beauty industry of 2026, where trends can be born, copied, and declared dead before a product could possibly complete stability testing. Norvina knows this better than most. She helped build ABH during a very different internet, when beauty YouTube had a recognizable cast of characters, Instagram feeds still felt relatively communal, and a single launch could seem as though it had reached everyone with an interest in makeup.

Modern Renaissance was perhaps the ultimate example. Released in 2016, the palette became one of ABH’s defining products, with its warm neutrals, berry shades, and Renaissance-inspired packaging arriving at precisely the right moment for a generation learning increasingly elaborate eye looks online. For Norvina, however, its significance was more personal. It was the product that allowed her to feel that she had earned a place inside a company carrying her mother’s name.

“Honestly, I think when I made Modern Renaissance, because it was such a passion project of mine and it had such a cult following, and I really felt like, yeah, this is cool. I did this and it’s not eyebrows,” she says. “Obviously, when your mother is successful and known for something, you never want to be like, ‘Oh, I’m just here because of my mom,’ or whatever. So I have to really work hard to be like, ‘I did my thing.’”

Her mother, she adds, is “tough.” That toughness appears to have translated into a particularly unsentimental education in running a company. The biggest lesson Anastasia taught her daughter was that ownership does not mean escaping the work. It means knowing enough about everybody else’s job that you can step in when something goes wrong. “Whatever you do, don’t get into this game if you’re not prepared to run it,” Norvina recalls her mother telling her.

Where Anastasia is patient and financially calculated, her daughter describes herself as “more impulsive” and “a gambler.” It is a useful tension, particularly because one of Norvina’s biggest gambles came before the rest of the industry understood how radically beauty was about to change.

When ABH wanted to move beyond brows and into makeup, retailers were skeptical. The brand did not have the budget for the enormous magazine campaigns that could introduce an entirely new category to consumers. Instagram offered an alternative. Norvina saw a growing community of makeup obsessives talking directly to one another and realized ABH no longer needed to wait for the traditional beauty establishment to give it permission to speak. Norvina recognized Instagram’s potential early and used the platform to help ABH make the leap into color cosmetics.

“What I saw really was a way out,” she tells me. “You can finally talk to people without taking out a hundred thousand dollars ad in a magazine or whatever it may be.” More than a decade later, everyone can talk to everyone. Ironically, Norvina thinks this has made it considerably harder for anybody to talk to everyone.

It is probably one of the better explanations for why beauty culture now feels simultaneously enormous and strangely siloed. A product can be inescapable on one person’s TikTok feed and virtually nonexistent on another’s. Brands with comparatively modest follower counts can command ferociously loyal communities. There is no longer a universally agreed-upon roster of beauty influencers, products or aesthetics because, as Norvina puts it, “Everyone is living on their small planet.” Trends consequently move at a speed that makes developing products around them almost pointless.

“Honestly, I think it would be foolish now to develop or steer the company towards a trend because it will not last enough for me to even make it to stability with the product,” she says. The challenge is figuring out whether an internet fixation contains an actual change in how people want to wear makeup or whether everyone is simply bored. “You have to discern what is forever and what is like, ‘I’m bored, entertain me right now.’”

She is hardly immune to any of it. During our conversation, she points to the charms and stickers suddenly appearing on everything online, including her own belongings, while simultaneously predicting everyone will probably find them ridiculous within a week. That self-awareness also appears when we discuss the Middle East, where ABH has maintained an enthusiastic customer base and where the death of full glamour has been somewhat exaggerated.

“What I love about the consumer there is they love makeup, they love cosmetics, and there’s a huge social element around cosmetics,” Norvina says. “It’s like 2016, never left there. I love it.”

Even supposed minimalists, she argues, are often doing considerably more than they think. “I talk to a lot of my Gen-Z employees sometimes and they think that they’re so minimalist. I’m like, ‘You’re really not, babe. You’ve done eight steps just to get one base on. You’re doing a lot.’”

Perhaps that is why lips have become one of ABH’s fastest-growing categories. Norvina tells me the company noticed lip sales increasing over the past three years even before it began giving the category serious attention. Kiss Theory, which launched this summer, continued growing beyond the initial four or five-week period when she would normally expect the excitement surrounding a new release to begin tapering. She also deliberately pushed to keep the product at a more accessible price point, arguing internally that consumers were already being asked to spend more on almost everything else.

“I would get annoyed if prices keep going up for everything,” she says. “At some point, you have to surprise and delight the consumer with something that is more comfortably priced, and you would be surprised to learn that they might buy two or three shades.”

“Girl math,” I tell her.

“Yeah, exactly. Literally.”

For all the talk of algorithms, virality, and scale, Norvina seems increasingly interested in making beauty feel smaller again. Earlier this year, Anastasia Beverly Hills supported MILLE’s Our Table event during Paris Fashion Week, bringing together global majority creatives working across fashion and culture for dinner. The appeal for Norvina was partly that it did not resemble the increasingly elaborate beauty activations filling everyone’s calendars.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by MILLE (@mille_world)

“I think everyone has been in this death match of events and popups. It’s getting a little tired,” she says. “It’s nice to sometimes be with peers, be with a really good conscious group of people that are all really aware of where the world is at.”

It circles back to something ABH began with long before Instagram existed: people sitting across from one another. Anastasia built the company through a salon chair, talking to clients while doing their brows. Norvina spent her teenage years at its front desk learning how to speak to strangers. Then she helped take those conversations online and watched them expand until the room became so crowded that everybody started breaking off into smaller groups again.

Her ambition for the next five years consequently sounds surprisingly analogue. She wants to return to one of her mother’s longtime goals: a beauty academy. COVID disrupted those plans, but Norvina believes teaching beauty as a trade matters even more in an industry increasingly obsessed with making everything immediate.

“If you teach somebody a trade, you basically have given them tools for a lifetime,” she says. “It’s important to know how to do makeup, you can employ yourself anywhere in the world, easy.”

She also wants ABH to rebuild the sense of makeup community that helped define its earliest years online. The company is self-funded again, she tells me, and after navigating the disruptions that followed the pandemic, she wants to get closer to the people using the products. “I like to feel close to people,” she says. “I don’t like to be too detached. I get lonely.”

It is a surprisingly vulnerable admission from someone who has spent much of her career helping a family beauty business become very, very big. Yet after nearly 45 minutes talking about laboratories, Instagram, lip products, her mother, Tokyo, Paris, beauty trends, Aquarius moons, and why Fashion Week is considerably more enjoyable when you stop trying to attend everything, it also feels perfectly consistent.

From the Front Desk to President: Norvina Soare on Growing Up Inside Anastasia Beverly Hills

Related Stories

More From Beauty

Newsletter

The only newsletter you won't unsubscribe from

Follow Us