After decades spent working on more than a thousand faces around the world, Vimi Joshi is turning her understanding of colour, warmer undertones and Eastern beauty traditions into a Dubai-born beauty brand with global ambitions.
Dubai has become one of the world’s most sophisticated beauty markets, yet relatively few make-up brands born in the region have made the leap to genuine international recognition. Vimi intends to be one of them.
Her proposition didn’t begin with a gap identified on a spreadsheet. It began with faces. More than a thousand of them, according to Vimi, and decades spent working as a professional make-up artist at international fashion and beauty events.
What she saw was an industry that did not always understand warmer undertones.
“I knew there was an undertone that needed to be seen on the global platform,” she says, referring to South Asian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Latino complexions.
After years of working with other people’s products, Vimi decided to make her own.
Before the brand, there was Lulu
Vimi’s route into beauty is considerably less predictable.
Growing up in a traditional Indian family, she was expected to pursue a conventional profession. By the early 1990s she was living in London, working as a medical representative during the week and, at weekends, dancing in British pop music videos.
Then came the moment that changed everything.
On one shoot, Vimi was having her make-up done when another woman sat beside her. As the artist worked, she watched the woman become louder, more animated and seemingly more confident.
Forty-five minutes later, Vimi looked across. It was British singer Lulu.
“At that moment I understood the magical transformational power of make-up,” she remembers. “I knew then I wanted to become a make-up artist.” The lesson stayed with her.
“Beauty is personal and individual,” she says. “It’s a form of self-expression that allows you to be who you want to be.”
A different understanding of colour
There are already enough make-up products in the world. The more interesting question for any new beauty founder is simple: why does this need to exist?
Vimi’s answer lies in colour.
Years spent working across different complexions taught her how pigments and undertones behave on actual skin. A lipstick can look one way in its bullet and quite another once applied. An eyeshadow can appear intense in a palette, then lose its impact on a warmer complexion.
“I felt like after decades in the industry it was time for our undertones to be seen and represented,” she says.
That gives Vimi Joshi Beauty its most persuasive point of difference. Vimi didn’t learn colour to launch a beauty company. She launched a beauty company after decades of learning colour.
Turning her expertise to products
The first collection looks deliberately eastward.
Vimi wanted to celebrate the skin tones, culture and heritage she knew intimately, beginning with the eyes.
“The eyes are a huge part of Eastern beauty,” she says.
Kohl-rimmed eyes, expressive liner, saturated colour and an unapologetic approach to glamour all informed the collection.
Vimi spent more than three years developing the range and says she was involved at every stage, from raw pigment and colour development to texture and packaging. She worked closely with beauty industry executive Jennifer Balbier and with factories and chemists across Europe and Asia.
And the expertise translates. Our Global Beauty Editor Catalina has been wearing the collection, and the make-up delivers. The pigments are rich, the shadows blend beautifully without losing their intensity and the textures feel considered. The kohl is another standout, with a creamy glide and the depth of colour you want from a product so central to the brand’s Eastern beauty influence.
There is a difference between a beauty brand with a good story and a beauty brand with good make-up. Vimi Joshi Beauty has both.
Dubai to the world
Dubai has been Vimi’s home for 22 years. She describes it as the city that “inspires me, motivates me and challenges me to become the best version of myself”.
It has also given her a front-row seat to the beauty cultures of the wider region. Vimi points out that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Oman and the UAE each have their own beauty habits, rituals and styles.
That distinction matters.
Global beauty has long looked towards the Middle East as a consumer market. Vimi Joshi Beauty asks a different question: what happens when beauty expertise developed within the region starts travelling outwards?
Vimi calls hers “an international brand founded in Dubai”.
According to Vimi, the brand is currently exclusive to Ulta Beauty Middle East in physical retail and sells online across the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UK and US, with European expansion planned.
Ask where she wants the company to be in five years and there is no carefully rehearsed corporate answer.
“Global domination!!!”
Three exclamation marks included. And given the quality and range of her products, we believe she means every one of them.
The woman behind the ambition
Away from make-up, Vimi meditates, is fascinated by spirituality and human behaviour and can happily escape into a mindless Netflix series.
“I am definitely a Scorpio extremist,” she says.
She loves art, travel and books, recently finishing Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love. “Finishing a book feels like saying goodbye to a friend.”
At home, she loves cooking Indian vegetarian food and inviting friends over for dinner.
It is a softer counterpoint to the size of her professional ambition.
Vimi Joshi Beauty may be at the beginning of its international story, but the expertise behind it was built over decades. There is a distinctive cultural perspective, a serious understanding of colour and, importantly, make-up that delivers once it touches the skin.
Dubai has already produced some of the world’s most influential beauty consumers and globally recognised beauty brands.
Vimi Joshi intends to add her name to that list.
The world, apparently, is not enough.
The Raven Five
The lipstick shade you would wear for the rest of your life?
Vimi Joshi Beauty Red Bindi (we agree, it’s our current obsession)
The beauty product you never travel without?
Vimi Joshi Beauty Kali Kohl Pencil
The city where you most love shopping for beauty?
Dubai
The person, past or present, whose make-up you would love to do?
Audrey Hepburn
Finish this sentence: Beauty should make you feel…
EMPOWERED
Discover Vimi Joshi Beauty and shop the collection at www.vimijoshibeauty.com
or follow @vimijoshibeauty on Instagram for the latest from the brand.
