“We Knew People Would Love It & People Would Hate It” — The Lipstick Lesbians Get Real About Leaked Labs

The beauty influencer-to-brand-founder pipeline is nothing new; from Mikayla Nogueira’s Point of View to Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, the market has never been more saturated with creator-led business hoping to hit it big. So, when Alexis Androulakis and Dr. Christina Basias Androulakis — better known as The Lipstick Lesbians — announced that they were embarking on a new business venture, Leaked Labs, we had questions.  

Leaked Labs isn’t so much a brand as it is a virtually unheard-of beauty concept bringing the consumer into the product development lifecycle.  
In other words, you get to choose which makeup products make the cut after trying them out in a beta-style rollout. 

Earlier this month, the brand’s first drop (aka “Leak”) came in the form of Amplify Flexi Powder, an Italian-sourced flexible pigment disc that can be worn wet or dry on lids, cheeks, and elsewhere on the face and body. (Our beauty director likened the texture to thin pieces of leather.) I’ll be super honest: I’m very comfortable with makeup (so much so that I did my own bridal glam), and even I had a serious learning curve with the stuff. Swatched dry, I wasn’t getting the color payoff I wanted, so I went back to the drawing board. My preferred method ended up using a clear highlighter balm like the discontinued Makeup by Mario Master Secret Glow as a base for the pigment to “grip” onto — Tower 28 makes a similar product that’s still available. On the brand’s social media channels, Androulakis has recommended misting your shade(s) of choice with a single spritz of your preferred setting spray (I like MAC’s Fix+ for this) and picking up the product with a small brush. 

I wasn’t the only one with mixed first impressions; internet hot takes bubbled up, with many beauty consumers feeling confused. Is Leaked Labs selling prototypes or finished products? (The answer: A limited batch of finalized, safety-tested cosmetics that other brands pass on.) Others wondered whether bacteria would build up with direct skin contact and repeated wetting. (Per another video from the brand, the preservatives in Flexi passed a standard 28-day microbial stress test.) How sustainable is it? (Impressively so — all four discs are essentially packaging-free (since they’re not set in a palette), so when you’ve completely used up the product, nothing is left behind, save for the tiny aluminum tin that can be recycled or repurposed.)  

While this may sound like a whole lot of drama for such a young brand, part of it was not only expected but intentional. “Flexi is a definitely conceptual first launch, and that was done intentionally, to be honest,” Basias Androulakis tells me. “We knew that some people would love it, and some people would hate it.” After all, Leaked Labs is all about bringing consumers into the product development process, so it’s only natural that feedback will range from glowing to critical to confused. But it seems they’re taking this in their stride: “I absolutely love the conversations that are taking place, and we are going to be playing with the scale of innovation and what consumers feel is innovative,” Basias Androulakis explains, adding that future “leaks” won’t always be “as conceptual” as their debut.

In other words, Leaked is coming in hot with Flexi, knowing that future launches will have broader appeal. (It’s a risk, to be sure, since most brands seek to capture as many fans as possible upon launch, but then again, disruption and transparency are what the Lipstick Lesbians build their following on.) In their own words, Androulakis and Basias Androulakis describe Leaked Labs as a “product development engine” — essentially a real-time beauty experiment-meets-focus-group, where customers deliver live feedback via social media comments as well as a follow-up survey to get more quantitative and qualitative information. “Down the road, we're thinking about doing more closed-community focus groups and product development workshops that actually teach people how to evaluate products when they purchase,” Basias Androulakis adds. “It’s really based on what the community wants.”

At this stage, the brand is nimble enough to respond to reception (basically, if a product sells out) by bringing it back if the demand is there, or sunsetting ones that don’t resonate. “If there's a technology that we feel we can bring to market that no one else has, then we feel almost obligated to do so,” says Androulakis. 

In my eyes, this is where the true value of Leaked Labs lies; could you go to Sephora and purchase a beauty product that delivers a similar result as Flexi? Absolutely — and probably for less than Flexi’s $34 retail price. However, the whole point of Leaked Labs isn’t just to put more stuff out there.

The Lipstick Lesbians know, just as well as we do, that the world doesn’t need more beauty brands. After weeks of testing, my takeaway is that Leaked is a beauty lover’s dream come true: A chance to try the most cutting-edge innovations — some weird and wacky, yes — that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to, unless you have a degree in cosmetic chemistry. (Which, I do not.) And in an age of beauty sameness, I’ll speak for myself: All I want to do is play.