Kylie Jenner is in crisis mode. Or, at least that’s what people on TikTok are saying.
The once influencer queen and Kardashian clan golden child is nowhere near as important to the cultural landscape as she once was. Kylie, like her sisters, is never truly out of the conversation, but it’s hard to pinpoint the last time she was at the origin of a trend the same way she used to be, repeatedly and constantly, during her late teen years and the prime of her celebrity.
Jenner first took over the Internet in the mid-2010s during the advent of platforms like Vine and Instagram, both of which she used to their maximum potential to develop and grow her brand. A big part of that brand, again, like for all the members of her family, is their image, and for Jenner, that was centered around her lips.
At the time, the celebrity influencer was adamant that she achieved the plump look of her lips with make-up. Although she would later admit to using lip fillers, the lip-liner schtick stuck and soon she launched the infamous Kylie Cosmetics Lip Kit. The launch was a huge success and, in many ways, became the blueprint for celebrity beauty brands in the social media age.
Is Kylie Cosmetics going bankrupt?
Different TikTok content creators seem convinced Kylie Cosmetics, a company that was once valued at $1.2 billion (more on that later), is struggling to keep the lights on.
The conversation largely began after TikTok user Bee Better, the co-founder of a therapeutic honey company, did a deep dive on the “Downfall of Kylie Jenner” where he analyzed why Kylie Cosmetics was apparently failing. The video went viral and was picked up by Nicky Reardon and Coco Mocoe of the Share Your Screen podcast who decided to dedicate an entire episode to the theory.
The source for all these creators’ numbers seems to be the German statistics aggregator website Statista where a chart shows Kylie Cosmetics’ e-commerce net sales from 2017 to 2022, with additional forecast data for 2023 and 2024. According to this data, whose sources are hidden behind a paywall, the company went from $68.7 million in revenue in 2017 to nearly half of that amount in 2022, with predictions placing its e-commerce net sales at $29 million for 2024.
Without accessing its sources, which we don’t think either Bee Better or Share Your Screen accessed, we would advise anyone reading this or watching the clips to take Statista with a grain of salt.
There are other indicators, however, of Kylie Cosmetics’ demise, namely the controversy surrounding the 2019 Forbes article that called Kylie Jenner the world’s “youngest self-made billionaire.” In the article, the beauty brand was valued at $900 million. Months after, Jenner sold 51% of her company to Coty for $600 million, which increased its value to $1.2 billion, per The New York Times.
Calling Jenner a “self-made billionaire” is an outrageous statement in itself, considering the family she was born into and the kind of platform the reality show gave her from a very young age, but much worse than that was a statement released later by Forbes which revealed that “the family lied repeatedly about the size of the brand and even had their accountant draft tax returns with false numbers. Forbes estimates Jenner, now 26, made $340 million after taxes from the sale of Kylie Cosmetics and, in May of 2020, said she was no longer believed to be a billionaire.”
That blunder, along with the truth about Kylie’s cosmetic surgery coming out (shockingly, her full lips were not achieved through using a lip-liner and lipstick) and rumors about its lip products being suspiciously similar to ColourPop’s, put Kylie Cosmetics in a new light. It’s easy, then, to imagine the impact of these three controversies on the enterprise’s health.
Something else podcasters Reardon and Mocoe point out is that Jenner has been on a new-brand launch spree, with a new fragrance and a new vodka line coming out within mere days of one another in March 2024. It’s hard to find a post on the socialite’s Instagram page that doesn’t contain some kind of advertisement or paid sponsorship. According to the Share Your Screen duo, this is a sign of desperation, caused by the failure of Jenner’s main source of wealth, Kylie Cosmetics.
“When the authenticity wanes, so does the celebrity influence, and that’s when the sales start to decline,” Bee Better said in his insightful video. There are no official sources about Kylie Cosmetics allegedly going bankrupt or even being on its way to it, but if it ever does come to pass, don’t forget it, you heard it on TikTok first.