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If you printed my resume as a line, it would not go up and to the right. It would look like a child drew it.
Insurance. Finance. A part-time job at the makeup counter at Bloomingdale’s in Short Hills. A jewelry business of my own called To Bead Or Not To Bead, run while I was paying off Wharton loans. Then beauty: Boots, John Frieda, Unilever, Coty, SiO Beauty. Brands with Elizabeth Taylor, Halle Berry, Celine Dion, Kimora Lee Simmons. Then, in my fifties, co-founding a skincare company with Celeste Lee.
People sometimes say that last one like it is a surprise ending. It is not. It is the only ending those detours could have had.
Before any of it, there was Nassau School and a fifth-grade teacher named Annie V. Moore.
I had a little business in fourth grade. We called ourselves the little chefs. It was not a business in any serious sense, but it was the first time I understood that you could make something out of nothing but an idea and some nerve.
I believe that during this time I learned that I could take the leap and the net would appear.
Mrs. Moore stayed my mentor for decades. She wore Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds every single day. Years later I worked on that fragrance and ran its relaunch, and I promise you I did not plan that. To this day, if I catch White Diamonds in an elevator, I am ten years old again, and someone believes in me.
That is the thing about a scribble. The lines cross.
Insurance and finance taught me a P&L. I can read one in my sleep, and I have never once apologized for being a beauty founder who likes numbers.
The makeup counter at Bloomingdale’s taught me the actual customer. Not a persona in a deck. A woman standing in front of a mirror in department-store lighting, telling you something true about how she feels in her own face. I have never had better market research than that, before or since.
The jewelry business taught me what it costs to make a physical thing and sell it for more than it cost. Margin is not a theory when you have strung the beads yourself.
These leaps and pivots are what led me to the pursuit and creation of my beauty career.
None of it was a plan. All of it was preparation.
I want to be honest about the part that was not charming.
At forty-five, inside a major beauty company, I hit what I have described as an invisible wall. I was constantly questioned and doubted. I assumed it was me, because that is what we are trained to assume. Then I started talking to other women my age and found the same story in their mouths, almost word for word.
It is not a personal failing. It is a pattern, and the pattern has a name now.
I finally said enough is enough and decided to take the leap into my own business.
Here is what people miss about starting something at fifty. You are not starting over. You are starting with everything.
I had twenty-five years of brand building. I had watched my mother’s skin fail her during chemotherapy and found nothing on any shelf that did more than sit on the surface. I had my own hormones changing and the same disbelief every woman has when the routine that worked for a decade stops working in a season. And I had Celeste, who had been thinking about the same problem from a different angle for years.
We came up with ideas all through our forties. We started the business in our fifties.
I personally believe that what we are building is a broader platform to embrace women in their grown up years.
I get a version of the same message every week. I am forty-eight and I want to change everything. I am fifty-five and I have an idea I cannot shake. Is it too late?
No. Here is what I actually believe, from the inside of it:
If your path looks like a scribble, welcome. You are in very good company.
Tell me about yours at care@cairebeauty.com, or reply to our email. I read every one.
No. Lorrie King moved through insurance, finance, a makeup counter, a jewelry business and twenty-five years of beauty brand building, then co-founded Caire Beauty in her fifties. In her words: “You are not starting over. You are starting with everything.”
Yes. Lorrie King and Celeste Lee came up with ideas all through their forties and founded Caire Beauty in 2020, when both were in their fifties.
Through a series of pivots. She worked in insurance and finance, as a part-time makeup artist at Bloomingdale’s in Short Hills, and ran her own jewelry business, To Bead Or Not To Bead. She then built brands at Boots, John Frieda, Unilever, Coty and SiO Beauty, working with Elizabeth Taylor, Halle Berry, Celine Dion and Kimora Lee Simmons, before co-founding Caire Beauty with Celeste Lee.
It is the point, often around 45, when experienced women find themselves constantly questioned and doubted at work. Lorrie described hitting it inside a major beauty company in Life After 45: Staying Competitive in the Workplace, where she wrote that many colleagues whispered that they experienced the same.
Lorrie King is Co-Founder and CEO of Caire Beauty. She is the co-author of The Pro-Age Playbook with Celeste Lee.
Highlights from the fifth annual Marvelous Mrs. Menopause: friendship, bone health and work.
Caire Beauty is now on QVC every month. Lorrie King on what the milestone means.
