Influential beauty executive Anastasia Soare shares her improbable journey from communist Romania to Southern California in Raising Brows: My Story of Building a Billion-Dollar Beauty Empire. Trained as an artist, Soare is founder and CEO of Anastasia Beverly Hills, a "global beauty empire." She is known in the industry as "the Queen of Brows." Her A-list clientele includes Jennifer Lopez and Oprah Winfrey.
Soare is an animated narrator, combining her Macedonian roots and rebellious family spirit into a riveting origin story that captures the "twists and turns of extreme joy and difficulty" of her life as an immigrant, mother, and businesswoman. As a schoolgirl, Soare worked in her mother's tailoring shop and learned what it means to "show up at your best." Leaving Romania and immigrating to the U.S was a dream come true, one Soare nurtured by watching bootleg copies of American movies such as Pretty Woman.
Each chapter outlines the purposeful steps and serendipitous moments that led to the launch of Anastasia Beverly Hills. There is an appealing simplicity to Soare's business strategy, which includes a focused passion on customer experience and a recognition of the power of kindness at every level of her organization. Soare created industry awareness of how eyebrow shape can impact a face and is credited with applying the golden ratio (inspired by how Leonardo da Vinci utilized it in his own work) to her clients' brows to enhance their natural features.
Brimming with inspiration, practical advice, and entertaining anecdotes, Raising Brows offers the intimacy of a memoir and an invaluable blueprint for building a business from the ground up. --Shahina Piyarali