SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 21, 2026 – Today, Sephora North America announced the newest class of 12 beauty brands selected for its 2026 Sephora Accelerate program, its signature incubator dedicated to helping emerging brand founders navigate growth and build long-term success in prestige beauty.
Now in its tenth year, Sephora’s industry-leading curriculum continues to evolve and create opportunities for founders to access the knowledge, connections, and mentorship that can help transform early-stage ideas into thriving brands. This year’s 2026 cohort reflects the breadth of innovation shaping beauty today, with founders spanning categories including skincare, makeup, haircare and fragrance.
“Since we’ve launched Accelerate, every year we’re introduced to a volume of talented, emerging founders with strong visions, differentiated products, and fresh perspectives that will shape the future of beauty,” said Priya Venkatesh, Global Chief Merchandising Officer at Sephora. “We are excited to welcome this latest cohort of brand visionaries and help this talented cohort build up the community, confidence, and capabilities needed to successfully navigate the complex journey of growing a brand in the prestige beauty industry.”
Meet the 2026 Sephora Accelerate Cohort:
- Sarah Guller & Lexie Hull, FORTA Cosmetics – Cofounded by WNBA pro Lexie Hull, FORTA is a performance cosmetics brand built for the active woman, with products designed to withstand sweat, motion and long hours.
- Krys (Deal) Lunardo, Dealbodies – Dealbodies delivers clinically-fueled body concentrates with 4x the active strength of standard body care to fight flare ups.
- Tatiana Ramuth Glezer, MOWE Beauty – MOWE is skin-first makeup made for movement. Designed like performance wear, it’s breathable, sweat-adaptive and built for motion.
- Kristin Lim Duckworth, BASE-K – BASE-K is a scalp-first haircare brand rooted in Korean head spa tradition, built around a refined daily ritual that supports healthier, denser-looking hair over time.
- Elysia Chen, Pepper Pout – Pepper Pout is a beauty brand bringing a modern East-meets-West perspective to beauty through thoughtfully designed products that feel playful, personal, and culturally fresh.
- Christina Eison, Reference – Reference is a fine fragrance and personal beauty brand built on Syncretic Beauty™, a product framework drawing from seven global terrains to create original scent and body essentials with the depth to endure.
- Jenna Morales Ledbetter, Omora Beauty Lab – Omora is a clean beauty brand that creates complexion-focused makeup for acne-prone and sensitive skin, formulated without pore-clogging ingredients, fragrances, or common irritants.
- Flavia Zhamo, Everyday Chemist – Everyday Chemist treats skincare as an object of craft, formulated and handmade by a mother-daughter engineering studio.
- Mimi Koné, MORÉ – MORÉ is the first premium, science-backed hair care ritual built exclusively for textured hair.
- Tanya Gonzalez Chandhok & Faye Harris Wood, EAUSO VERT – A female and Latin-owned fine fragrance brand redefining a traditionally unchanged market by centering culture and lived experience through scent.
- Ye Jin & Nick Burns, Manuscript – Manuscript is a clinical-grade hair longevity brand that treats scalp aging like prestige skincare treats skin – addressing thinning, graying, and long-term scalp health in one daily serum, for less than $1 a day.
- Hannah, Innae Beauty – Innae Beauty creates thoughtfully designed beauty products that help customers feel their best from the inside out.
The reimagined Sephora Accelerate curriculum focuses on the phases of modern business building: establishing a new brand, scaling at large, and building a long-term, sustainable future. Participants will receive access to industry experts, seasoned beauty founders, and Sephora executives who will share strategies for global success. Founders will also receive personalized, one-on-one mentorship tailored to their unique business needs.
Beyond the program, cohort members also gain access to extended Sephora initiatives, including the Sephora Impact Summit, which aims to inspire and champion the next generation of beauty brands including Sephora Accelerate within the Sephora network; as well as monetary opportunities such as applying for the $100,000 Sephora Beauty Grant, awarded in partnership with the Fifteen Percent Pledge.
Since launching in 2016, Sephora Accelerate has helped elevate new and often underrepresented founders across the beauty industry, many of whom have gone on to launch at Sephora and build loyal customer communities. Alumni brands including EADEM, Kulfi, Topicals, Bounce Curl, and OLIVIAUMMA represent the impact of founder-led innovation and the role Accelerate continues to play in helping champion new voices in prestige beauty.
The 2026 cohort was selected from a competitive pool of Spring 2026 applicants across North America. Eligible applicants were required to be at least 18 years old, have a North American-incorporated company, and be in the early stages of development (i.e., not yet widely distributed by others). In selecting finalists, Sephora also considered each brand’s vision, innovation, and current stage of product development. To learn more, please visit accelerate.sephora.com.
