Rachel Roy Launches First Beauty Product

Fashion designer Rachel Roy draws on her love of dramatic, smudgy eye makeup to launch the Rachel Roy Eye Shadow Collection.

Having made a big splash in the fashion world with a signature body-conscious look that exudes spunky elegance, Rachel Roy is now drawing on her distinctly Indian fetish for dramatic, smudgy eye makeup to enter the beauty market with the Rachel Roy Eye Shadow Collection.

The collection features 10 shades of eyeshadow with two brushes divided into warm day and cool night colors with varying degrees of shimmer. Roy’s collection harkens back to her girlhood when she often watched her aunts on her Dad’s side — the Indian side — getting ready for work.

“All of my aunts on my dad’s side didn’t have much,” she recalls. “But they had beautiful saris, plastic bangles up their arms, and a kohl eye — no matter what. Some of them went to clean because they were maids, but they were the most beautiful maids.”

Roy’s other credential for entering the beauty business is her experience doing her own sultry makeup for events, featuring smokey eyes and brash lips. It will be interesting to see whether she can incorporate her fondness for the Indian practice of eyebrow threading into her beauty line.

Since launching her designer fashion line in the spring of 2005 Roy has had her dresses seen at Hollywood events on celebrities like Kate Hudson, Lucy Liu, Michelle Obama, Sharon Stone, Penelope Cruz, Diane Sawyer and Iman. Her line is distributed in upscale department stores like Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. In 2009 she also launched her lower-priced RACHEL Rachel Roy line sold exclusively in Macy’s.

Roy has also won exposure as a columnist for InStyle magazine, doing Oscar fashion red carpet coverage for EXTRA TV and appearing in episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show, America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway. In early 2006 Roy received a Bollywood industry award for her contribution to American fashion.

Rachel Roy was born on January 15, 1974 in Monterey, California to an Indian father and a Dutch mother. She attended Seaside High School on the Monterey Peninsula. Her first fashion industry job was working as a sales clerk at a Contempo Casual boutique at the age of 14. She studied liberal arts at Washington Adventist University in Takoma Park, Maryland and graduated in 1996.

After graduation she moved to New York where she worked as a stylist. A job with the founders of Rocawear led to an internship at the startup label. She launched her Rachel Roy line in Spring 2005.

Roy’s brother Rajendra Roy is the chief film curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2005 she was married to Damon Dash whom she met at Rocawear and with whom she has two daughters, Ava and Tallulah. She and Dash divorced in 2009.