From hair longevity to performance makeup to globally inspired fragrance, Sephora’s 2026 Accelerate cohort reflects growing trends in prestige beauty and the founders driving them.
The retail giant has announced the 12 brands selected for its 2026 Sephora Accelerate program, marking the tenth year of its flagship incubator for early-stage beauty entrepreneurs.
Designed to help promising founders build sustainable brands, the program combines business education with one-on-one mentoring from Sephora executives, experienced founders, and industry experts.
This year's class highlights beauty's fastest-growing trends. Performance beauty features strongly, with FORTA Cosmetics and MOWE Beauty developing makeup designed to stay put through high-energy activity.
Hair health continues to gain momentum through brands such as BASE-K, inspired by Korean head spa rituals; Manuscript, which focuses on hair longevity; and MORÉ, a premium haircare line presented as a ritual for textured hair.
Fragrances lean heavily toward cultural perspectives to beauty: Pepper Pout blends Eastern and Western influences, while Latin-owned EAUSO VERT reimagines luxury scent through travel-inspired notes.
The program serves as a launchpad for one of the fastest-growing segments in beauty entrepreneurship: founder-led brands.
Participants receive guidance on brand building, scaling, and long-term growth, while gaining access to Sephora's wider founder network, the Sephora Impact Summit. They become eligible to apply for the $100K Sephora Beauty Grant in partnership with the Fifteen Percent Pledge.
Selection for Accelerate is competitive. Applicants must operate an early-stage, North American-incorporated beauty business that has not yet achieved broad retail distribution.
Sephora evaluates founders on their vision, innovation, and stage of product development, with the aim of identifying brands capable of long-term growth.
The program's growing influence can be seen through its alumni. Brands including EADEM, Topicals, Bread Beauty Supply, Kulfi Beauty, and Bounce Curl have all gone on to build cult followings.
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.
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.
- Christina Eison, Reference – Reference is a fine fragrance and personal beauty brand built on its proprietary Syncretic Beauty, a product framework drawing from seven global terrains to create original scent and body essentials with the depth to endure.
- Flavia Zhamo, Everyday Chemist – Everyday Chemist treats skincare as an object of craft, formulated and handmade by a mother-daughter engineering studio.
- 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.
- Mimi Koné, MORÉ – MORÉ is the first premium, science-backed hair care ritual built exclusively for textured hair.
- 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.