She’s launching the brand Fel Beauty today on Sephora’s website and app with a single lip-and-cheek product, the $22 Kissylips Hydrating High Shine Lip and Cheek Balm, with a 300-door rollout slated for Jan. 2. A pocket-friendly compact multiuse balm, its formula delivers a sheer but buildable tint in eight shades, including warm berry, rose nude, pinky red, rose mauve, blush pink and beige nude in affectionately playful names like “I’m Yours,” “Luv Ya” and “Crush,” which were whittled down from 22 with Sephora’s guidance on the right shades for a diverse customer base.

“What we have is really unique and special in the category, and the goal is to reach people and give them these moments of nostalgia, surprise and delight,” says Holmes. “We really want to bring joy back into beauty and do things a very different way.”

Kissylips’ formula is designed to be nourishing and hydrating, feel silky on the lips and provide a high-shine glossy effect. It features lip-barrier-supportive raspberry seed oil, antioxidant-rich rice bran wax, tri-light esters for the shine and a proprietary ingredient complex sourced from the South of France that Holmes explains is intended to boost the body’s natural supply of endorphins and oxytocin.

With Fel Beauty, she sought to create a brand that offered emotional resonance without sacrificing performance. The name is pronounced “feel,” and the mission is centered on rekindling positivity and personal memories through beauty. Fel Beauty expresses that philosophy through the universal act of a kiss, be it a person’s first or the most earth-shattering. Kissylips’ primary packaging is shaped like a pair of lips so that consumers can literally kiss the color onto their lips and cheeks.

Lip-themed packaging has appeared in beauty before (YSL, Moschino and Hard Candy have had packaging with lip motifs, for example), but largely as novelty design rather than a meaningful part of product application. Fel Beauty’s Kissylips stands apart because the lip shape isn’t merely decorative; it invites an application gesture akin to a “kiss” and reinforces the brand’s emotional positioning.

Holmes says, “We’re introducing innovation across the board in formula, ingredients and new form factors, and the complete sensory and emotive experience really connects when anyone has a physical introduction to the product.”

Fel Beauty soft-launched in direct-to-consumer distribution on Dec. 5, but the plan from the beginning was to get in front of customers in a physical environment.  Sephora’s footprint and reputation for incubating cutting-edge innovation made the retailer the brand’s choice for its first stop in stores. Holmes has largely self-funded Fel Beauty, but it’s also received an undisclosed amount of funding from The Angel Group, an early-stage consumer packaged goods investment firm that has backed Bubble Skincare and Poppi.

Sephora has been instrumental in making lip products one of the brightest sales engines in beauty lately. Sparked by Summer Fridays’ Lip Butter Balm and extending to products like Ole Henriksen’s Pout Preserve Peptide Lip Treatment, Rhode’s Peptide Lip Tint and Eadem’s Le Chouchou Exfoliating + Softening Peptide Lip Balm, the chain has countered softness in cosmetics by exciting consumer interest in lip products such as lip balms, oils and peptide-infused treatments that blur the line between color and care, and responding to it, with Fel Beauty being another spoke in that flywheel.

According to market research firm Circana, lip has been one of the fastest-growing segments in prestige makeup for the past two years, consistently yielding double-digit gains even as overall makeup growth has slowed to the low single digits. Prestige consumers have been purchasing more lip products by unit, not just trading up, signaling that demand is coming from genuine usage and replenishment rather than merely higher prices. Of course, there are open questions around whether hybrid lip products’ momentum will sustain, and if consumers have too many in their stockpiles or will move on to lipsticks, the beauty staple that’s been taking a backseat.

Long before the latest crop of lip products, Holmes began her beauty industry career 19 years ago on Sephora’s color cosmetics merchandising team. She transitioned from there to Benefit Cosmetics, Perricone MD and Too Faced, where she worked on Better Than Sex Mascara, the mascara that became a category-defining hit despite initial skepticism.

Holmes recalls, “I remember taking it to Sephora and them saying, ‘Good luck, that’s never going to work. You’re never going to enter the category, you have no credibility in mascara,’ but I learned a lot about having conviction behind things that were new and different and maybe sometimes felt risky to retailers.”

She later joined LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned Kendo as head of global brand management and sales for Ole Henriksen, which she helped relaunch globally, notably with its Banana Bright franchise that blended skincare and makeup long before hybrid formulas became standard. That was followed by a sales and marketing VP post at Memebox-owned Kaja, a pathbreaking K-Beauty-inspired color cosmetic brand at Sephora.

Holmes then shifted to a dual role as VP of beauty and wellness at Goop, where she managed internal product innovation and merchandising for nearly 200 brands. The four-year stint gave her a broad view into industry trends, and over time she began to see brand presentations that were increasingly repetitive. “It gave me a lot of pause,” says Holmes. “I started to think about what the industry was becoming and how I wanted to have an impact differently.”

In the future, Fel Beauty is poised to expand into product categories beyond lip. “Our desire is to always be introducing something that’s new and different, that’s first-to-market, whether it’s an innovation in the formula, the packaging or the application method,” says Holmes. “Ideally, we’re accomplishing all of those three things at once.”

To fuel awareness, the brand is investing in wide seeding and community-building efforts. Fel Beauty is sending out 550 boxes to influential friends of the brand like makeup artists, editors, beauty experts and tastemakers. Subsequently, it will select a curated group of ambassadors reflecting its values.

Fel Beauty’s marketing centers on storytelling around the experience of a kiss, and content on that theme will be woven into its digital ecosystem and Sephora events will bring the concept to life. The brand expects to be showcased prominently in Sephora emails and store activations.