Ask entrepreneur Anastasia Soare—one big idea can, as she writes in her new book Raising Brows: My Story of Building a Billion-Dollar Beauty Empire, change a life forever.
For Soare, that moment was when she developed her golden ratio method for eyebrows, a method that has allowed her name to become synonymous with eyebrows in a way peanut butter is akin to jelly, for example. Soare immigrated to the U.S. from Romania in 1989, and the next year introduced a new brow shaping technique to clients she called the golden ratio eyebrow shaping method. By 1992 she had rented a room at a popular salon, quickly gaining celebrity clientele; five years later, in 1997, she opened her Beverly Hills flagship salon, Anastasia Beverly Hills, one year before Soare appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to debut the golden ratio method in 1998.
From there, the brand inked deals with several chain retailers to start selling Anastasia Beverly Hills products to the mainstream in 2004, and 10 years later, the brand expanded into color cosmetics with the launch of its Contour Powder Kit in 2014.
With Soare’s golden ratio method, balance and proportion are the foundation; the shape of a client’s eyebrow is tailored to their unique features. Soare discovered her game-changing idea after realizing that the mathematical principle of thirds—the golden ratio—can also be applied to faces for visual harmony. When features appear symmetrical, they are perceived as more beautiful—and, as Soare writes in Raising Brows, using the technique on her clients “produces a powerful transformation that enhances people’s natural features. I loved seeing the effect this had on women’s confidence.”
After she began applying this scientific formula to her client’s faces, “taking this concept off the canvas and onto the brows of real-life people was game-changing,” she writes in the book, out October 21.
“I do not think that anyone else had ever thought about them the way that I did,” she added of eyebrows. “I recognized a need that served my clients and a void in the beauty industry that created an entirely new category.”
Speaking to me on Zoom, Soare—who has been doing eyebrows for more than 30 years—recalls the look clients would have after she finished shaping their eyebrows and gave them the mirror to look and see what she had done.
“And a smile was on their face because I think eyebrows—it’s one feature on our face that brings so much balance and proportion, brings the harmony within our face—and the human eye, even if you are not an expert on what the eyebrow should be, the human eye is encoded to recognize that perfect balance and proportion to the face,” she says. A perfect arch, a perfect eyebrow groomed just for that specific person in the chair—“for some reason, they feel so empowered,” Soare says.
“I became kind of the best kept secret”
Soare’s idea was years in the making. When she still lived in Romania, she studied technical design for five years, and to understand how to draw a portrait, one has to understand the golden ratio—the three zones of the face needed to be equal to create the perfect balance and proportion.
“When you draw a portrait on a piece of white paper, you use the pencil to shade and you use more, you press harder or less just to shade perfect, to create the cheekbones, the nose, the eye sockets and everything,” Soare explains. Her teacher “always gave us all the examples of the art and Leonardo da Vinci, that he used the golden ratio, and in architecture. So we learned everything about it.”
Her eye started getting “very trained” to the golden ratio by learning in school and also helping her mother create dresses for different body types. When she moved to the U.S., she “never thought that I will ever use anything that I learned there,” she says. “I start working as an esthetician because, in the ‘90s, it was the only job that didn’t require perfect English. I didn’t speak the language. I used to take some English classes at night, but it takes time to learn the language.”
As she began work as an esthetician, “I realized that clients didn’t pay attention to eyebrows,” she tells me. Not only that, but—as was on trend at the time—eyebrows were tweezed within an inch of their lives. After seeing photos of herself, “I looked at every picture and I thought, ‘Wow, I look surprised in every picture,’” Soare tells me. “And everything came back to me, the golden ratio, everything I learned. So I started going to the library and I started taking all the books about Leonardo and everything that I could find on the golden ratio. And I said, ‘I have to find the perfect shape for my face and fix my eyebrows.’”
She started with herself, then took the golden ratio method to her clients. They loved the way they looked. They loved the way she looked. They couldn’t figure out what it was—was she more rested? Did she change her hair? “They didn’t know it was the eyebrow because it wasn’t a service that people were used to in the ‘90s,” she says.
It’s hard to imagine now, but before Soare, eyebrows weren’t at the top of the priority list. Because of her influence, the beauty community now understands the importance of the eyebrows to a face. Soare put eyebrows on the map, and her client list is astounding: Jennifer Aniston. Victoria Beckham. Hailey Bieber. Naomi Campbell. Amal Clooney. Cameron Diaz. Paris Hilton. Heidi Klum. Eva Longoria. Jennifer Lopez. Madonna. Michelle Obama. Reese Witherspoon. The aforementioned Winfrey. All five Kardashian-Jenner sisters, and Kris Jenner, to boot. And that’s just for starters. Rarely has someone been so singularly successful and in-demand in their specific field.
The origins of Soare’s lucrative business came from a “desire for doing something for my clients,” she tells me. “It was a joy for me to see a client—and I think I learned that from my mother. I remember my mother living when she loved to see her clients being dressed and having that confidence and feeling beautiful. And I had the same thing with doing my clients’ eyebrows. I used to do facials, I used to do body waxing, but eyebrows was something more, was an instant change. They will walk outside of my salon and people will stop them on the street and say, like, ‘Wow, you look so pretty.’”
Business grew from word-of-mouth, and a 1992 piece on Soare in Vogue catapulted her even further. After this, she realized that she should zero in on eyebrows, “because eyebrows, number one—it’s a walking advertisement. Number two, it changes immediately somebody’s face. A facial will take time for me to do. Somebody that had acne, it took several years to fix or several months, weeks or months to fix her skin. But eyebrows was an instant change, and it gave me so much joy to see the client. So I became kind of the best kept secret. And that was the moment when I thought, ‘I’m going to focus only on eyebrows.’ And this is what I did.”
Beauty expert and former Cosmopolitan beauty director Carly Cardellino calls Soare “one of the sweetest founders in beauty” and also someone who “has truly defined what it means to be a brow architect.”
“She led the modern brow movement in the ‘90s with her golden ratio brow-shaping technique—mapping where your brows should begin, arch and end—to bring, in her words, balance and proportion to every face and has since built a legacy of artistry and precision that has stood the test of time,” Cardellino tells me. “While countless brands have flooded the brow category, her ability to innovate, expand globally and remain culturally relevant within her cosmetics line and digitally—with the help of her social media savvy daughter Norvina, president and creative director of the company, who has helped the brand amass just over 18 million followers on Instagram and 1.1 million on TikTok—has cemented her as not only a leader in the beauty space, but a visionary who continues to shape it.”
“When you love what you do, you feel like you don’t work one day”
Raising Brows is part memoir, part business book. She talks to me about how her mother told her “You could do anything you want,” and how “Once your mother tells you that you could do anything, you start believing it.” Her Romanian roots pushed her, when it came to wobbles in business, to “figure it out. I will find a way, because in Romania, to survive, you had to figure it out,” she tells me.
Soare is real and authentic about the challenges of founding a business—“I always think, if I knew how difficult it is, maybe I will never start,” she says—and how business is hard. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. “It’s not easy, but you need to really love your work to keep going,” she says. “Because I had days when I will go home and I will think, ‘I can’t do this anymore. This doesn’t take me anywhere. Nobody believes—nobody.’ And I will go to sleep, and I will wake up the next morning and I will forget what I was saying the night before.”
“So it’s difficult, and a little naivete is very good,” she continues, admitting that she’s had “to compromise a lot” but also that, in her words, “When you love what you do, you feel like you don’t work one day.”
When it comes to writing a book, she says that for years people asked her to do it, but she wasn’t particularly interested—but after the pandemic, the timing felt right to share her story. “I think everybody needs that push, that excitement, that encouragement that you could do it,” she tells me. “You know what I mean? The only reason I wanted to do this is just to inspire other people to follow their dream and they could raise some eyebrows on their own.”
“We cannot offer our clients anything that is not exceptional”
A huge moment in Soare’s business happened after being featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where she got to show off her golden ratio method to a global audience. Her appearance on Winfrey’s show in 1998 “was literally the most incredible moment in my career, because it’s exactly like getting an Oscar,” she tells me. “It was huge because she was the original influencer. It was like the ripple effect.”
“Nobody is like her,” Soare says. Winfrey has become a longtime client, and Soare calls her “the most genuine. She was a mentor. I watch her, we become friends. She invited me to her 50th birthday.” Later, Winfrey would throw Soare a 25th anniversary party as she celebrated a quarter century of Anastasia Beverly Hills. “How amazing was that?” Soare says. “What a woman. And I watch her over the years, how she handled people, how she respects everyone.”
That has become a tenant of Soare’s business ethos, as has authenticity, quality and surrounding herself with people that she can learn from. When the business ventured into product development, she insisted that the quality of the product be exceptional.
“We cannot offer our clients anything that is not exceptional, number one,” she says. “Number two, we need to teach our clients, educate our client how to use the product.”
Building a successful business wasn’t without frustrations. After she created the golden ratio method and products to support it, the copycats came. She went to a trademark lawyer and asked why these individuals felt the need to copy her. Why couldn’t they come up with their own original ideas? “And he said, ‘I will give you a piece of advice,’” she tells me. “‘I am old. I am going to retire very soon, but I will give you a piece of advice. Try to focus on building your brand so that people will associate your name, Anastasia, with eyebrows.’”
“And that is what I did,” she says, triumphantly.
“If they believe in their dream, they should go for it”
In addition to being its founder, Soare is also the CEO of Anastasia Beverly Hills’ beauty brand, which is available in almost 2,000 stores internationally. In 2023, Forbes estimated the value of the entirety of Anastasia Beverly Hills at approximately $500 million, with $240 million in annual revenue.
“My entire career I wanted to master my craft,” Soare says. “I wanted to be the best. This was from the beginning—I wanted to do the best eyebrows ever. I didn’t care about—of course, I needed the money to pay my bills, but I never wanted to be famous or to build a huge empire. Everything was organic. Everything that I’ve done, I have to love it. I have to feel it. I have to give back to my clients. This is what I work for.”
Now, Soare’s latest challenge is writing a book. “The only reason why I wrote this book is for people to read it and get something out of it,” she says.
She says, ultimately, she wants to give readers “the power and encouragement that, if they believe in their dream, they should go for it.” The blueprint of how Soare did it is laid out in Raising Brows’ pages.