Trish McEvoy

Trish McEvoy started her brand in 1975 with six hand-crafted brushes, made because the New York makeup artist could not find professional tools she actually wanted to use. Fifty years on, the numbered brush system is still a signature, but the idea the brand is really built on is Makeup Wardrobing: the notion that you should own a small, deliberate set of products organised for the life you actually lead, rather than a drawer of impulse buys.

That philosophy has a physical form in the patented Makeup Planner, a refillable portable palette system that is genuinely unusual in prestige beauty for being a patented format rather than a packaging style. The line spans long-wear eye products, skincare-makeup hybrids like the Beauty Booster Serum and Even Skin Face Perfector, and a fragrance range. With her husband, dermatologist Dr. Ronald Sherman, McEvoy opened one of the first medi-spas in the United States, well before clinical skincare and cosmetics converged as a category.