The Ratio
Somewhere in a Beverly Hills salon in the early 1990s, a Romanian woman who barely spoke English was trying to explain
Leonardo da Vinci to a skeptical boss. The pitch went something like this: the human eye is hardwired to perceive beauty as a function of balance and proportion, and the single most transformative feature on the human face — the one that determines whether you look surprised, angry, tired, or radiant — is the eyebrow. Her employer was unmoved. Clients came in for facials and bikini waxes, not Renaissance art theory. The Romanian woman — five feet four, caramel-haired, doggedly persistent — kept offering free brow shaping anyway, squeezing the service into hour-long facial appointments until she ran late for the next client and was told to stop. She did not stop.
That woman was Anastasia Soare, and the insight her boss dismissed would eventually produce one of the most improbable fortunes in the American beauty industry: a company valued at $3 billion, a client list that reads like the seating chart at the Vanity Fair Oscar party, and an entire cosmetics category — eyebrows — that essentially did not exist before she willed it into being. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1989 with a one-year-old daughter, zero cents of American money, no grasp of the English language, and a visceral, sweat-inducing terror that she would be turned back at the border and sent to Romania. Thirty-six years later, she is still shaping brows by hand at her Beverly Hills flagship, still running the company she founded, and still — as of Christmas Eve 2025 — writing personal checks to keep it alive.
The story of Anastasia Beverly Hills is not a clean arc. It is a story about the collision of Old World craftsmanship and New World celebrity machinery, about an immigrant who intuited something invisible to an entire industry and then spent decades convincing the world she was right. It is also a story about what happens when private equity arrives at the party, and what happens when the founder decides to buy the party back.
By the Numbers
Anastasia Beverly Hills
$3BPeak valuation (2018 TPG deal)
$225MSoare's personal equity reinvestment (2025)
9 secGlobal frequency of Brow Wiz sales
30+Countries where ABH products are sold
19M+Instagram followers at peak
$60KCost to open first Beverly Hills salon (1997)
1Category created: eyebrows
Constanța, the Tailor's Shop, and the Architecture of Need
To understand Anastasia Soare, you must understand her mother. A tailor and seamstress in the Black Sea port city of Constanța, Romania, she became the sole breadwinner when Anastasia's father died in the late 1960s — Anastasia was twelve. Under Ceaușescu's regime, which by the mid-1980s had reached a particularly grim nadir — no electricity after 6 p.m., bread lines stretching for hours, toilet paper obtainable only through barter — her mother ran a clothing business out of their home, living in constant fear that the state would seize it. She woke at six in the morning and worked until midnight. She never complained. "I told myself, I don't want to work like that," Soare has said. "But later on, I came here and I realized — I became my mother."
The tailor's shop was Anastasia's first classroom. She did homework between the sewing machines. She helped purchase fabric, managed the books, and — most crucially — learned the relationship between measurement, proportion, and how clothing could transform a woman's sense of herself. Her mother taught her, without using the words, about the Golden
Ratio: "Our client has smaller shoulders and bigger hips, so we need to balance this. Let's add some shoulder pads or make adjustments so the design would complement her body." The principle was intuitive, physical, embedded in the act of fitting a garment to a specific human form. It would later become a patent.
Soare's formal education was unusual. She enrolled in a combined high school and college program in construction engineering — "There was no traditional alma mater as there is in the U.S.," she has explained — that included six-day school weeks and extensive coursework in mathematics, architecture, and art. An art teacher introduced her to Da Vinci's studies of facial proportion, and specifically to the idea that if you want to change the emotion in a portrait, you change the eyebrows. She filed this away. She studied cosmetology alongside her technical coursework. She watched a house painter mix his own pigments — blue and green, with a little shimmer — and used the loose powder as eye shadow. "I don't know how healthy that was," she has said, "but I'm still not blind!"
There was also the salon. Every Sunday, no matter how dire the circumstances, Soare's mother took her to get a manicure and pedicure. Nails painted. Spirit preserved. "That was always an uplifting pleasure," Soare told the Los Angeles Business Journal in 1999. Beauty, in the Soare household, was not frivolous. It was an act of resistance against the inhuman.
The Defection
In 1979, Anastasia gave birth to her daughter Claudia. Her husband Victor was a naval captain, and at some point in the mid-1980s — the chronology varies slightly across sources, but the most consistent accounts place it around 1987 — he defected to Italy and petitioned the American Embassy for political asylum on behalf of his family. By 1989, as Ceaușescu's regime entered its final, violent convulsions, Anastasia and the then-one-year-old Claudia were permitted to leave. The math here doesn't quite resolve: if Claudia was born in 1979, she would have been closer to ten years old by 1989. Some accounts describe Claudia as a toddler at the time of departure, and Soare's own memoir uses the phrase "one-year-old daughter." Other sources describe her saving money to leave for years after Claudia's birth. The discrepancy may reflect the compression of memory under trauma, or the way immigrant narratives calcify into a single, polished version of events. What is consistent across every telling is this: she arrived in Los Angeles with no American money, no English, and no certainty she would be allowed to stay.
"I was scared down to my bones," she writes in
Raising Brows. "An overwhelming, visceral, sweat-inducing fear. What if we were rejected and sent back to Romania, after all that we had gone through to get here?"
They were not sent back. They moved into a small apartment in the San Fernando Valley — a drastic downsizing from the family's large home in Constanța — and Anastasia confronted the blunt reality of starting over. She learned English by watching
The Oprah Winfrey Show. The irony would take a decade to become apparent.
The Salon on Melrose, the Room at Juan Juan, and the Education of an Aesthetician
Within six months of arriving, Soare found work as an aesthetician at a boutique salon on Melrose Place in Beverly Hills — a job that required manual skill rather than verbal fluency. She did facials and body waxing. The owner loved her work ethic and offered a permanent position. Soare was, by her own description, "like a sponge. I wanted to understand and it was absolutely this desire to learn and to find out what is going on and how I could become better."
Two things happened almost simultaneously. First, she noticed that none of her American clients groomed their eyebrows — a practice that was standard in Romania. Second, her first client happened to be Cindy Crawford. "I didn't even know who she was," Soare has said, "but she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen." After Crawford came Naomi Campbell, then a procession of supermodels delivered by a client who happened to be a modeling agent, who returned to the salon one day "with a van full of girls" that included Stephanie Seymour.
Soare began offering brow shaping as a complement to her facial treatments, asking each client: "Do you want me to do your eyebrows, too?" Nobody was charging for this. Nobody considered it a real service. Her boss told her to stop — it was making her run late. Soare tried to explain the Da Vinci theory, the golden ratio, the idea that eyebrows were the most expressive feature on the human face. Her boss refused.
So in 1992, Soare did what immigrants without safety nets and with everything to lose do: she took a risk. She had saved $5,000 over a year and a half — a sum that, in 1992 dollars, bought a rented room, a facial machine, and a first month's lease at Juan Juan, an upscale salon in Beverly Hills. She offered eyebrow shaping, facials, and body waxing. She was across the street from Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, and the makeup artists at those department stores quickly realized something: their jobs got dramatically easier when clients arrived with properly shaped brows. They started sending everyone to Anastasia. Word spread with the velocity that only Beverly Hills word-of-mouth can achieve.
Her husband Victor, who had become a cab driver in Los Angeles, was not supportive. He told her she had no business taking such a risk when she had only recently arrived in the United States. The marriage did not survive her ambition. They later divorced.
"I came here to do something," she told him. "I have to do this."
The Walking Advertisement
What Soare understood before anyone else in the beauty industry was that eyebrows are architecture. They are the single feature most responsible for the emotional legibility of a face — and because they sit above the eyes, they are the first thing anyone sees. A poorly shaped brow can make you look perpetually startled, perpetually angry, perpetually exhausted. A well-shaped one can restructure the entire geometry of a face without touching anything else. It is, in her formulation, the cheapest and most dramatic transformation available in beauty. And in the early 1990s, it was a service nobody offered and a product category that did not exist.
She codified her technique as the Golden Ratio Eyebrow Shaping Method, based on the principle of divine proportion that she had first encountered in her engineering and art studies. The method involves establishing three precise points: one on an imaginary vertical line through the middle of the nostril, a second where a line from the tip of the nose through the center of the iris intersects the brow, and a third where a line from the edge of the nostril through the outer corner of the eye reaches the brow bone. These three coordinates define the shape of the arch for any individual face. Soare would later patent it.
The insight about marketing came accidentally. When a magazine asked Soare for a celebrity testimonial, she reached out to Michelle Pfeiffer, a longtime client. Pfeiffer's response was illuminating: "Well, I cannot tell them you do my bikini wax." It was too intimate, too private. Eyebrows, by contrast, were a walking advertisement — visible on every face that left the salon. Soare pivoted her entire identity around brows. "I was thinking, maybe I should focus on eyebrows, because it's a walking advertisement."
In 1994, Vogue published its first article about the mysterious woman named Anastasia who did eyebrows in Beverly Hills. In the same issue, by coincidence, legendary makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin — a Louisiana-born prodigy who had helped define the supermodel era and whose book Making Faces would become a beauty bible — was discussing the importance of eyebrows. The juxtaposition created a seismic moment. "Everything exploded after that," Soare has recalled.
By 1996, she was so booked with brow appointments that she couldn't do anything else. She was working twelve-hour days, six days a week at the salon, doing house calls on Sundays. She was also, simultaneously, flipping houses. She would buy a home on Benedict Canyon, remodel it, decorate it, sell it, and funnel the profits into her savings. She did this repeatedly between 1994 and 1997, building capital the only way available to an immigrant with no credit history, no bank willing to issue a loan, and no access to venture capital.
"I went to the bank to get even a credit card, and they didn't want to give me a credit card because I didn't have a history here," she has said. "No credit history, and nobody wanted to give me a credit card, or not even a question to get a loan."
Beverly Hills, 90210
In 1997, with $60,000 she had saved from seven years of eyebrow appointments, facials, house calls, and real estate flips, Anastasia Soare opened her own salon on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. It was the only salon in the world offering brow shaping as a standalone service. The waiting list grew to three months for a ten-minute procedure that cost $30 to $40.
She needed product. When she shaped a client's brows, the results were immediate and striking — but clients went home and had no way to maintain the look. Soare had been improvising: mixing eyeshadow with aloe vera and Vaseline to create a crude filler that she could use to complete the shape. But it washed off in the shower. There were no eyebrow-specific products on the market. Not a pencil, not a pomade, not a powder designed for brows. The category simply did not exist in the cosmetics industry.
So she created it. After multiple visits abroad to develop formulations, Anastasia Beverly Hills launched its first product line at Nordstrom in 2000. Soare did not realize that you had to pay makeup artists at department stores to sell your products — or that if the products didn't sell, you had to buy them back. "When I launched at Nordstrom, I thought, 'They will buy the products and that's it,'" she has admitted. "Well, I learned that they have to sell them; otherwise, you have to take them back."
She learned quickly. She drove to a different department store every weekend to personally demonstrate the products and train customers on how to use them. This was before social media, before YouTube tutorials, before the democratization of beauty knowledge. The only way to explain an eyebrow pencil to a skeptical consumer was to stand in a Nordstrom aisle and draw on someone's face.
One early product disaster proved instructive. ABH launched a body line with shea butter that was entirely natural, with no preservatives — years ahead of the clean beauty movement. "It was amazing and so good for your skin," Soare has said. "But with no preservatives, after a few months, the shea butter started smelling. We lost money, but I learned from it."
In 2004, ABH struck deals with several chain retailers to bring products to mainstream consumers. In 2006, the brand launched at Sephora. In 2007, it expanded to Ulta. Each new retail partnership dramatically increased volume and visibility, but Soare remained the engine: personally developing products, personally visiting stores, personally shaping the brows of every celebrity who walked through her salon door.
The Oprah Effect
The phone call came sometime in 1998. Oprah Winfrey's production team wanted to know if Anastasia Soare would come do Oprah's eyebrows live on television.
I met and I worked with so many celebrities, but when I met Oprah — that was my Oscar moment.
The terror was real. Shaping eyebrows live, on camera, on the most-watched daytime television show in America, on the face of the most famous woman in broadcasting — this was not a practice run. One wrong tweezer stroke would be broadcast to millions. "To do her eyebrows live in front of a camera is very difficult," Soare has said. "I wanted to cry. I wanted to jump. I don't even remember what."
She kept her composure. She walked the audience through the technique. Oprah loved the result.
"You will not find anybody better than her on the planet for doing brows," Winfrey told her audience. "I haven't. Ooh, look at that brow, baby."
The phone did not stop ringing.
This was a different media era, one in which a single Oprah appearance could transform a business overnight in ways that no amount of Instagram impressions can replicate. Oprah's audience was concentrated, loyal, and habituated to trusting her recommendations with the force of religious conviction. The salon's three-month waiting list became a six-month waiting list. Brow shaping entered the national vocabulary. And Anastasia Soare — the woman who had learned English by watching Oprah — had now appeared on Oprah's show, reshaping the host's face while millions watched.
The circularity of this — watching Oprah to learn the language, then teaching Oprah about eyebrows — is almost too symmetrical to be believed. It belongs to the mythology of immigration, that peculiarly American genre in which the student becomes the teacher, the viewer becomes the star, the nobody becomes the somebody. Except that Soare had been working toward this moment for nearly a decade, and the appearance on Oprah was not a windfall but a culmination.
The Instagram Inflection
For the first twelve years of its product existence — 2000 to 2012 — Anastasia Beverly Hills grew through the ancient channels: department store counters, magazine editorials, celebrity word-of-mouth, and television appearances. It was a respected niche brand in the beauty industry, dominant in the brow subcategory it had invented, but not yet a cultural phenomenon.
The transformation came via Claudia Soare, Anastasia's daughter, who had worked at every level of the organization — starting at the front desk of the salon — and who in 2012 pushed her mother onto Instagram. Claudia, who goes by her Instagram handle @norvina, had an early-adopter's instinct for social media and an understanding of what would later be called the influencer economy before the term existed.
ABH became one of the first prestige beauty brands to treat Instagram as a primary marketing channel rather than an afterthought. The brand posted user-generated content — real customers showing their brow transformations — alongside professional tutorials and celebrity endorsements. The approach was radically democratic for a luxury brand: it signaled that ABH's products were for everyone, not just the celebrities who visited the Beverly Hills salon. By 2016, the brand's Instagram account had amassed the largest following in the beauty industry — more followers than MAC, more than
Estée Lauder, more than any competitor. Digiday reported that ABH's earned media value on Instagram reached $46.5 million, nearly double MAC's $26.4 million.
Claudia's role extended well beyond social media. As president of the company, she oversaw product development and creative direction, becoming what several profiles have described as "a radical entrepreneur in her own right." She co-developed ABH's expansion beyond brows into color cosmetics — contour kits, eyeshadow palettes, liquid lipsticks — that drove explosive revenue growth after 2014. The iconic influencer collaboration palettes and the Contour Powder Kit turned ABH from a brow brand into a full-spectrum cosmetics company. "I make all the makeup," Claudia has said. "Obviously, I run everything by my mom first. She has to love it and approve it. But I make the makeup, and she makes the brow."
The mother-daughter dynamic is central to the ABH story, and it rhymes — inevitably, unmistakably — with the original dynamic: a daughter working alongside a mother in a shop, absorbing technique through proximity, doing homework between the sewing machines. "I realized later that she was also learning from me, which happened by proximity and through her abilities," Soare writes in her memoir. "I wanted to be an example to her of courage, resilience, and excellence and to lay the foundation for her success the way my mother did for me."
When your child sees you work — sees your values, your skills, your creativity — it can benefit them as well.
The $3 Billion Bet
By 2018, Anastasia Beverly Hills was generating an estimated $500–600 million in annual revenue with EBITDA margins around 20 percent — roughly $110 million. The brand had more than 19 million Instagram followers. It was stocked in nearly 2,000 stores worldwide. Brow Wiz, the brand's hero product, was selling at a rate of one unit every nine seconds somewhere on the planet. Soare had built all of this without a single dollar of outside investment.
Then TPG came calling. The San Francisco-based private equity giant — whose portfolio spans everything from Airbnb to McAfee to Ducati — offered approximately $600 million for a 38 percent minority stake, valuing the company at roughly $3 billion. Soare would keep 62 percent and remain CEO. TPG would bring "operational expertise" and "institutional infrastructure." The plan was to scale from $600 million to over $1 billion in revenue, expand internationally, invest in e-commerce, and eventually exit via IPO or strategic sale at $5–7 billion.
On paper, it was elegant. Soare took home roughly $600 million in personal liquidity — life-changing money by any standard, transformative money for a woman who had arrived in the country with nothing. She retained majority ownership and operational control. The deal was announced in June 2018 to widespread admiration.
What happened next is a cautionary tale that has become grimly familiar in the consumer brand landscape.
The Unraveling
The standard private equity playbook for consumer brands — professionalize, expand SKUs, diversify channels, add management layers, push into new categories and markets — was applied to ABH with predictable enthusiasm and less predictable results. The brand expanded its product line by roughly 40 percent. It pushed into new categories. It accelerated distribution into additional retailers and international markets. Executives from legacy beauty companies — L'Oréal types, Estée Lauder types — were brought in to "professionalize" operations.
The problem was that ABH's value had been built on focus, authenticity, and the founder's personal connection to her product and her customer. Diluting the brand across too many SKUs and channels diluted the very thing that made it special. Then COVID-19 arrived.
"COVID destroyed us," Soare has said bluntly.
The beauty industry contracted across the board, but ABH's capital structure — loaded with debt from the TPG transaction — made the company acutely vulnerable to a revenue downturn. Fitch Ratings projected a 30 percent revenue decline in 2020 and warned that ABH's capital structure was unsustainable. Soare's net worth, which Forbes had pegged at $1.2 billion in 2019, dropped to $540 million by 2020.
The debt — approximately $650 million — became an anvil. In August 2025, ABH missed a term payment on its loan. Both Standard & Poor's and Moody's downgraded the company's credit rating. S&P assigned a "D" rating — default. The brand that Soare had built from a rented room was, in the language of credit markets, distressed.
For TPG, the math was grim. They had invested roughly $600 million for a 38 percent stake at a $3 billion valuation. Seven years later, the company was worth a fraction of that, the debt was unsustainable, and their equity was effectively underwater.
For Soare, it was something else entirely. It was personal.
The Christmas Eve Recapitalization
On December 24, 2025 — Christmas Eve — Anastasia Beverly Hills announced a recapitalization transaction that amounted to one of the most dramatic founder-takes-back-the-company maneuvers in recent consumer brand history.
Here is what happened: Soare made a $225 million personal equity investment in ABH — later reported as part of a total $300 million equity commitment. The transaction reduced the company's outstanding debt from $606 million to a new $272 million first-lien term loan with a 4.5-year maturity. TPG's stake was diluted from approximately 38 percent to roughly 6 percent. Soare emerged as the overwhelming majority owner and retained her position as CEO.
🔄
The ABH Recapitalization
How Soare regained full control of her company
2018TPG invests ~$600M for 38% stake; ABH valued at ~$3B
2019Soare's net worth peaks at $1.2B (Forbes)
2020COVID-19 devastates beauty industry; Fitch warns of unsustainable debt
Aug 2025ABH misses term payment; S&P and Moody's downgrade to "D"
Dec 2025Soare invests $225M+ to recapitalize; TPG diluted to ~6%
Jan 2026S&P upgrades ABH to "CCC+" with stable outlook
The arithmetic, viewed from a certain angle, is remarkable. In 2018, Soare took out roughly $600 million. After taxes, she likely retained somewhere in the range of $375 million. In 2025, she put $225 million back. Her net position: approximately $150 million in retained cash plus near-total ownership of a company that S&P expects will generate roughly $50 million in EBITDA in 2026 — a company that, if it can return to growth, is worth multiples of what she paid to recapture it.
TPG, by contrast, invested $600 million and appears to be walking away with perhaps $50–100 million in residual value. That is a $500 million loss on what was supposed to be a "safe" consumer brand investment.
"I invested, not only my heart and soul," Soare told WWD. "I invested money because I really believe in this brand. I started a category in the beauty industry that didn't exist, which is eyebrows. And still today, we are the number-one brow brand in Sephora and every nine seconds around the world, a Brow Wiz is sold."
The recapitalization was not a victory lap. It was an act of conviction — or stubbornness, or love, depending on how you read it. A sixty-eight-year-old woman wagering a quarter of a billion dollars of her own money on a brand that credit agencies had declared in default. S&P's upgrade to "CCC+" acknowledged improved leverage metrics while noting that the stable outlook depends on modest revenue growth in 2026 and improved cash flow generation. Tariffs, retailer pullback, and a challenging global beauty market remain headwinds.
"With this recapitalization, we will be able to invest our money into growing the company," Soare said. "Innovation always is going to be our core."
The Craft and the Category
It is easy, amid the financial drama, to lose sight of the underlying achievement. Anastasia Soare did not merely build a successful beauty company. She created an entire category that the cosmetics industry had overlooked for decades. Before ABH, there were no brow-specific products at Sephora or Nordstrom. No brow pencils designed for the specific texture and pigment density that eyebrow hair demands. No pomades formulated to sculpt and hold brow shape. No highlighting pencils to define the arch. The eyebrow was, in the taxonomy of beauty, a nonentity — something you might tweeze into a thin line if you were following the Pamela Anderson–era trend, but never something you actively built, sculpted, or celebrated.
Soare changed the conversation. She reframed the eyebrow as the face's most important architectural element — the feature that frames everything else, that communicates emotion before you speak, that can be shaped to create the illusion of symmetry even on an asymmetrical face. And she backed the reframing with a technique grounded not in trend but in mathematical principle, which gave it an air of timelessness that trend-driven beauty brands cannot replicate.
The products that followed — Brow Wiz, Dipbrow Pomade, the various pencils and gels and stencils — were not innovations in formulation chemistry so much as innovations in category creation. They answered a question nobody had thought to ask. And they were developed by a woman who had personally shaped hundreds of thousands of eyebrows, who understood the problem at a tactile level that no product development team parachuted in from L'Oréal could match.
"You need to perfect your skill constantly," Soare has said. "I've been in this business for 32 years, okay? I constantly want to be better every day. I want to learn more. I want to be better than I was yesterday."
She still does client brow appointments.
The Marathon That Doesn't End
Soare published her memoir,
Raising Brows: My Story of Building a Billion-Dollar Beauty Empire, in October 2025 — the same season she was negotiating the recapitalization of her company. The book became a national bestseller. Kim Kardashian provided a blurb. Victoria Beckham provided a blurb. Oprah Winfrey provided a blurb. Jennifer Lopez called her "the American dream."
The memoir is both autobiography and business guide, though Soare does not really distinguish between the two. "There's no personal or business — for me, my personal goals are my business goals," she has said. "My brand is my life."
Until she sat down to write the book, she had never paused to take stock.
Since I came here, I worked so hard. I never sit down to think about it, to go back and look at my life... it was like running a marathon, and I couldn't stop, because that was the game.
There is something in this that resists easy sentimentality. The marathon metaphor implies a finish line, but Soare's version has none — just the running itself, the forward motion, the refusal to stop that she inherited from a seamstress in Constanța who worked from six in the morning until midnight because that was what survival required. The game is the game. You play it until you can't.
At sixty-eight, Soare shows no signs of stopping. She has reclaimed her company, reduced its debt, and positioned it for what S&P projects as modest recovery. She is the majority owner, the CEO, and the woman who still personally shapes brows at the Beverly Hills salon where she began — the same salon she opened with $60,000 in 1997, across the street from where she once rented a single room at Juan Juan, two blocks from the Neiman Marcus where makeup artists first started sending their clients to the Romanian woman who understood something about faces that they didn't.
The brow pencils are lined up in Sephora stores across thirty countries. Every nine seconds, somewhere in the world, a Brow Wiz sells. And in the Beverly Hills flagship, the waiting list is still months long — a queue of faces waiting to be read by a woman who learned to read them in a tailor's shop in Constanța, between the sewing machines, while the electricity was off and her mother worked by candlelight.
