Tina Chen Craig Built U Beauty on the Power of Less

As part of our fourth annual Made by Women series—which spotlights the best women-owned products and companies—we’re talking to Tina Chen Craig, founder of seven-year-old innovative skincare care brand U Beauty. With this series, we’re committed to giving a platform to female founders who own 51% or more of their business. This not only allows them to introduce their brilliant products to a wide and potentially new audience, but it also helps you—the discerning shopper—discover the best stuff out there.

Tina Chen Craig has taste. The kind that’s real, not learned—sharpened over decades spent moving between cultures, industries, and eras of the internet. Long before “founder-led” became shorthand for credibility, Craig was quietly shaping what luxury looked like, sounded like, and meant. After graduating from USC in the early 1990s, she began importing American fashion brands into Asia, before globalization became a buzzword. That same authority soon landed her in front of the camera as an MTV Asia host, interviewing pop icons like Spice Girls and Aqua (!!!) at a moment when pop culture still felt idiosyncratic and electric.

In 2005, she again proved her cultural fluency, co-founding Bag Snob, a luxury fashion blog that helped define the internet and legitimize blogging. Her voice—and commitment to the finer things—was funny, decisive, and refreshingly unswayed by hype, earning her a devoted readership and partnerships with the likes of Prada, Gucci, Valentino, and Cartier.

Beauty, however, is where taste met frustration. After years of personal research—and a growing annoyance with borderline absurdist skincare routines—Craig found herself pushing back against what she calls “cosmetic confusion.”

The answer, she knew, wasn’t another overstuffed 14-step line; it was restraint. And so, In 2019, she launched U Beauty, built around the radical idea that fewer products, powered by truly innovative technology, could deliver great results. The brand debuted with a single hero product—The Resurfacing Compound—and sold out a year’s worth of inventory in just 21 days.

The line has since expanded but is still tightly edited, with intentional products that aim to target specific skin concerns via new-to-market ingredients (U Beauty’s jellyfish-inspired Barrier Bioactive Treatment is unanimously a Holy Grail among Glamour editors.)

Today, the brand introduces a new product, the Barrier Bioactive Mist, which provides advanced moisture barrier support, defends against environmental stressors, and offers dewy hydration on impact—and can double as super-lightweight makeup setting spray.

U Beauty The Barrier Bioactive Mist

Below, the founder talks about success and rejection, her morning routine, why loving what you do is the only metric that actually lasts, and more.