The Woman Who Stopped Waiting for the Room

By day, Lyric Christian was rising at M·A·C Cosmetics. At the same time, she was building Mind Candy Beauty — a platform where Black beauty creatives are seen, heard, and hired.

Lyric Christian built her career fluent in two worlds at once. For more than seven years, she rose through M·A·C Cosmetics — one of the most storied houses in beauty — mastering the craft, the culture, and the business of the industry from the inside. And alongside that career, she built something entirely her own.

Mind Candy Beauty started with three questions she could not shake.

• Who is advocating for Black and POC artists?

• Who is spotlighting their work and investing in their careers?

• Who is creating space for them to tell their own stories — not just when it is trending, but all year long?

The longer she carried them, the clearer the answer became: she could not keep waiting for someone else to build the platform she was imagining. So she built it herself. Mind Candy Beauty exists to celebrate and elevate the voices shaping the future of beauty — through conversations, an editorial platform, a podcast, and live experiences that intentionally create opportunity for both established and emerging Black beauty creatives.

That distinction — representation versus access — is the engine of everything she builds. A campaign can put a face on a billboard. Access opens the door behind it. Christian wanted the kind of platform that opens doors and makes sure talented people are never overlooked simply because they were not already in the room.

Through Mind Candy Beauty, Christian has sat across from some of the most consequential founders in the industry — Danessa Myricks, Melissa Butler, Naeemah LaFond. Ask her what separates the brands that endure from the ones that fade, and her answer is immediate: the lasting ones never lose sight of who they are building for.

As brands scale, their audiences naturally grow — and Christian sees that as a beautiful thing. But the founders with staying power never abandon the people who believed in them first. They honor their original supporters while creating space for new customers to see themselves in the brand, and they make decisions from purpose rather than chasing what is next. People can tell the difference. That consistency is what builds trust.

Staying rooted in your why, she argues, is not a constraint on growth — it is the very thing that gives a brand the freedom to evolve without losing the heart of what made people fall in love with it in the first place.

Black consumers spend more than $16 billion annually on beauty, according to NielsenIQ. Yet Black founders still struggle to access capital, retail shelves, and sustained visibility. Christian has watched the same cycle repeat every year: Juneteenth arrives, Black History Month arrives, a cultural conversation becomes too loud to ignore — and suddenly everyone wants to spotlight Black founders. Then the calendar turns, and the spotlight moves on. It is part of a larger imbalance she names plainly: across the industry, far too few Black people and people of color sit in the rooms where decisions are made, even as the culture they create shapes so much of what beauty markets and sells.

Real support, she says, looks like year-round investment — capital, retail opportunities, marketing, long-term partnerships. A few weeks of attention cannot build a business. And the industry compounds the problem by treating Black-owned brands as niche, when many of them — precisely because their founders formulated with inclusivity in mind from day one — serve a broader range of consumers than the brands positioned as mainstream. They are marketed as Black brands instead of simply being recognized as great ones.

The opportunity, as Christian frames it, is not just to celebrate Black founders. It is to integrate them into the industry consistently and intentionally — independent of the calendar. That is the line between performative visibility and lasting impact.

Ask Christian what conversation the beauty industry is not having, and she does not hesitate: what it is actually like to be a Black woman working in corporate beauty. The lack of representation in leadership. The barriers to advancement. The way Black leaders struggle to be supported and retained once they finally reach the room.

She has seen brands reach eagerly for Black culture because they recognize its influence — while the internal work never follows. For Christian, cultural relevance cannot stop at the campaign. It has to extend to the people making decisions, shaping strategy, and sitting at the leadership table. Not borrowing from the culture, but building organizations where the people behind the culture have the opportunity to lead it.

Of all the founders and creatives she has interviewed, one shifted the way Christian thinks about leadership: Tomi Talabi, founder of The Black Beauty Club. What struck her was not a strategy or a milestone — it was how deeply rooted Talabi is in her purpose, and how completely she refuses to change who she is depending on who is in the room.

Christian names something many Black women recognize: the pressure to code-switch, to show enough personality to be relatable but never so much that you are labeled too much. Watching Talabi lead taught her that authenticity is not something you turn on and off for the audience — it is one of your greatest strengths.

Christian’s five-year vision for Mind Candy Beauty is not a pivot — it is scale. She wants it to become the go-to destination for Black and POC beauty creatives around the world: a place where artists, founders, and industry professionals come not just for content, but for opportunity, mentorship, relationships, and careers. Expanded live experiences. A growing editorial platform and podcast. Educational programming. More pathways connecting emerging talent to brands and industry leaders — internationally.

Her advice to emerging founders comes from having lived both sides of the industry. First: you do not have to do everything at once. The pressure to launch big, land Sephora or Ulta, raise funding, and scale immediately is real — but growth without foundation can hurt a business. Make sure your operations, finances, and audience can support the next level before you jump to it. And second: authenticity cannot be faked. People know when something is built to catch a trend versus rooted in genuine purpose.

Inside Lyric’s Beauty Bag

Before she goes, Christian opens the bag itself — the five products she refuses to be caught without, from a certain legendary M·A·C lip pencil she keeps in quintuplicate to the drugstore staple that has never let her down.

Christian built Mind Candy Beauty because she was done waiting for someone else to open the door. Now the platform she created is holding it open — for the artists, founders, and creatives shaping the future of beauty, all year long. She stopped waiting for permission. She built the table. And she is still pulling up chairs.