Why Kosas Clean Mascara Took 5 Years to Make
Kosas founder Sheena Zadeh-Daly breaks down why mascara is one of the hardest formulas to get right, what clean beauty actually means now, and why the best makeup should feel like care.
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Clean beauty has been around long enough now that, while we know what it means and what the benefits are, we still question whether it works.
Mascara, especially, has always been the make-or-break product. The one that separates a nice idea from a formula that can survive a full day, a long night, a humid commute, or lashes that simply refuse to cooperate. That’s part of why Kosas founder Sheena Zadeh-Daly says their newest mascara took years, not months, to bring to life.
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Why Clean Mascara Is So Hard to Make
Mascara is not like blush or lipstick, where texture and color can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Sheena tells Melissa Magsaysay on the ‘Live & Well’ podcast episode that mascara is technical. “It has to work, and it has to be tested,” Sheena explains.
She shares that Kosas spent five years developing their latest mascara because lashes are not one-size-fits-all. Some are straight. Some point down. Some smudge easily. Some need lift, others need separation.
To make a formula that works across the board, she says, you have to test endlessly.
“You have to test it on 300 different people to get that whole lash landscape covered,” she explains. “Every single iteration has to be tested… again and again and again.” In other words, clean mascara is not a quick launch. It is a long game.
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What Clean Makeup Actually Means Now
Zadeh-Daly is candid about the fact that conventional formulas have options that clean beauty often avoids. “There’s a lot of shortcuts that you can take with certain polymers,” she says. But she frames clean makeup the way people talk about food. “You can make food using a lot of lab-created things… but it will never, ever taste as good as that meal where every ingredient is perfectly sourced.”
Serena Williams tells LA Times Studios in an exclusive interview how motherhood and her active lifestyle inspired the creation of WYN Beauty — a clean, high-performance makeup brand that honors her legacy and champions a more inclusive future for her daughters.
And when clean beauty is done well, she argues, the difference is obvious.
Kosas Mascara and the Rise of Lash-Growth Ingredients
Sheena says she wants makeup to do something while you wear it. “If I’m putting something on my skin, I need it to be doing something for me at all times,” she says. That includes lashes. She notes that Kosas built a lash-growth peptide into the mascara itself, essentially combining makeup and treatment. “It’s as effective as a lash serum,” she says, “and in the end it’s built into the mascara.”
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This is where clean beauty is heading. Products that blur the line between makeup and care, not in a marketing way, but in an actually good-for-your-skin type of way.
Sheena’s philosophy has always been about comfort. She sees makeup as something that should support you, not correct you. She believes that beauty works best when it feels expressive and when products enhance what’s already there instead of covering it up.
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