The Lipstick Lesbians are closing their six-year-old lip product brand Fempower Beauty.
The popular married content creators—Alexis Androulakis, a makeup artist and product developer, and Christina Basias Androulakis, a digital strategist and former teacher with a doctorate in education and technology—announced the closure via email last Wednesday. Along with their content, they will be turning their attention to their next venture, an educational initiative building on Let’s Learn About Beauty, the program the duo launched in February with a beauty industry course and certification. Fempower’s products are being sold at a 50% discount on the brand’s website.
In the email, Androulakis and Basias Androulakis wrote, “Fempower gave birth to The Lipstick Lesbians. It helped us rewrite the rules, and it helped us find you—this brilliant, curious, truth-seeking community that’s grown beyond anything we imagined. And now, it’s time to say goodbye to this chapter. Not with sadness, but with deep gratitude.”
The yet-to-be-named bootstrapped project will make its debut in the fall of 2026. Unlike Fempower, it will live under The Lipstick Lesbians Media umbrella. Asha Talwar Coco, formerly president of FORVR Mood, CEO of Covey Skin, VP of sales and business development at Givaudan and director of new business development and licensing at Firmenich, joined the company as CEO in January to help guide the project. Androulakis and Basias Androulakis previously poured nearly $1 million from their personal savings into Fempower, which they launched in 2019 to encourage women to think critically about beauty rather than look critically at their features.
“We knew we no longer needed physical goods to sell to complete this mission,” says Androulakis. “We thought we did, and we were wrong.”
The seeds of Fempower were planted in 2014 on Androulakis and Basias Androulakis’ first date. Androulakis shared her dream of owning a beauty brand, an idea the teacher pushed back on. “Christina actually began to challenge me to think differently about beauty, about life,” recalls Androulakis. “When you bring someone who’s outside of the beauty industry and connect them with someone who’s inside, who has this totally different perspective, it forced me as this beauty insider to look at beauty from a completely different lens every day that we’ve been together.”
With the girlboss era in full swing and motivated by the Women’s March, Fempower started with a quartet of $25 lipsticks—Adam, Eve, Serpent and Lilith—in a collection called Genesis that reimagined the biblical figures. Lilith, a fiery red shade, became Fempower’s bestseller. In addition to the products, Androulakis and Basias Androulakis created a coaching service named Affirmation Application to discourage negative self-talk and promote positive self-image.
“Instead of just these representations of these characters, we actually challenged people to ask questions like, ‘Well, what would happen if Adam took a bite out of the apple first? How would life be different? How would it be perceived differently?’ Now you can totally see my English teacher brain influence on the marketing story,” says Basias Androulakis. “Fempower was always about helping heal the feminine, helping people step into their power.”
“We knew we no longer needed physical goods to sell to complete this mission. We thought we did, and we were wrong.”
The year it hit the market, the brand was rewarded $5,000 from girlboss royalty Sophia Amoruso on “Good Morning America.” In 2022, Fempower partnered with content creator Blair Imani on a collection of six dual-sided lip glosses called Smarter Lip Sets inspired by Imani’s digital microlearning series “Smarter in Seconds.” The products integrated lessons on racism and colorism into their packaging.
Basias Androulakis grabbed The Lipstick Lesbians’ TikTok account in 2021, and its content was mostly focused on their experiences as a queer couple at the beginning. In December 2022, Basias Androulakis recorded her wife at Sephora swatching and discussing Makeup By Mario’s Surreal Skin Foundation, which had just hit shelves, and the video racked up over 1 million views. A similar video about Haus Lab’s foundation hit almost 3 million views. Today, The Lipstick Lesbians has 1.1 million TikTok followers and about 500,000 Instagram followers. Prior to the success of their content, the pair was considering bankruptcy. Both Androulakis and Basias Androulakis faced unemployment, and Androulakis was undergoing treatment for hearing loss in her left ear.
The Lipstick Lesbians have partnered with many big names in beauty, including Charlotte Tilbury, Milani Cosmetics and Chapstick. With their forthcoming venture, Androulakis says the partners they bring on “are very much going to be partners in what we perceive as the future of beauty. This isn’t traditional in any context, nor was our ascent, nor is our existence or our platform. So, we have to stay true to that.”
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