Who’s Temptalia? Satisfy the Face Behind 70,000 Makeup Swatches

Integrity, honesty, and a virtually scientific focus on detail. These aren’t words which use nicely to each influencer, however they swatch superbly on Christine Mielke, the proprietor and creator of Temptalia.com. Launched in 2006 as a repository for Mielke’s then-burgeoning excitement for cosmetics, the website currently receives 850,000 unique visitors a month and acts as a source for beauty enthusiasts seeking to find dupes, get the ideal foundation shade, or decide whether the newest launch is worth their coins. Temptalia has come a very long way from its humble beginnings.

“It began only as a repository for cosmetics looks and my first ideas and impressions about the goods I had been purchasing at the moment,” says Mielke of Temptalia’s morning. Then a student at UC Irvine, the MAC counter had an irresistible pull Mielke, who hadn’t been permitted to wear makeup for a child growing up in California. Mielke would hurry into the counter once MAC started a new set, shooting swatches and sharing her first impressions on the newest goods on her newly-launched site. Following a year or so, the new took note of her job, inviting her into a media dinner in San Francisco Fashion Week and sending press trials, which felt as a landmark second. “It had been the fantasy! The single [brand] you write concerning understands that you exist also requires you badly. I only started to take it seriously … and branched out into different manufacturers,” Mielke says.

From the time she had been finishing a JD/MBA in Santa Clara University, it had been apparent to Mielke that Temptalia might be a fulltime occupation. While Mielke says that her fellow students of a JD/MBA program generally ended up following fund, tax or corporate legislation, or become CFOs, she leveraged her business savvy to construct the Temptalia brand, studying her own contracts with an exacting eye and coming her rising influence in the attractiveness community with a strong sense of its price, fostered in part with her mum. Mielke says that her mother was her mentor and role model. “She’s held CEO and CTO places, therefore, in the first days, she helped me avoid a few of the drawbacks that youthful entrepreneurs confront not understanding their worth,” she clarifies. Referring to her advanced level as a “very, very expensive backup program,” Mielke also admits that she considers that it made others take her more seriously as a young businesswoman.

Temptalia was Mielke’s full-time occupation because she completed grad school. Now, she has got help from two fulltime programmers, but all the work for your website — swatching, analyzing, writing, photographing, and reviewing — has been carried out by Mielke alone. She articles about 28 testimonials and 14 non-review articles (these include community-building articles such as “Temptalia Asks You”) a week. Mielke quotes she reviews a mean of 80 sunglasses each week. Because of a virtually constant influx of goods, consumer behaviour typically predicts what establishes Mielke will review on the website. Besides brands that work well with her busy readership (she states MAC, ColourPop, along with Pat McGrath Labs are just three of those brands that always do well with her viewers ) she also must think about the tastes of people who assess the site less often, the alluring up-and-coming brands which are gaining attention, smaller brands that deserve the spotlight, and also brands accessible out the U.S. Since 55 percentage of her readers don’t live in the states, Mielke takes her responsibility to her global audience seriously: “the cost to the consumer is a lot higher in non-U.S. countries. The markup on cosmetics in some countries is like double what it is [in the United States]. And so obviously you do not want to spend like $60 AUD and then find out, I hate this product!”

I don’t like to think of reviews as positive or negative. I know that probably sounds pretentious, but I just like to think of it as a review.

It’s a good deal to balance, and Mielke has to be realistic about what she has time to review and what has to be left by the wayside. “I sometimes put aside products I would similar to to review if I have time, and then there’s stuff that I know I’m never going to get to and I just set aside for donation because I’m at the point where I do not wish to keep products here for love two years in hopes someday I’ll have to it.”