When Kylie Jenner launches her lip kits of matching lipsticks and lip liners, it appears the youngest Kardashian-Jenner is suddenly at the helm of a sky-rocketing makeup company — one that catches the interest of Forbes magazine. But the truth may be more complicated. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. To connect with Infamous's creative team, plus access behind the scenes content, join the community at Campsidemedia.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What makes Kylie Jenner's lip kits so popular?
Hey, everyone. Thanks for coming back to Infamous this week. It's Vanessa. So we are about to play you a replay of one of our favorite series in this long, long catalog of infamous stories. And that is about Kylie Jenner and her lip kits and the insane experience that Natalie had interviewing Kylie and Kris Jenner.
It's June 2018, and I'm pulling up to Kris Jenner's house in Hidden Hills, northwest of LA. The first thing I do is drive up to a bougainvillea line security checkpoint, where a guard makes sure my name is on the list. Then I head down a street that has lots of rolling, grassy hills on either side, the gigantic plots of land separated by miles of white railings, the kind you'd see on a ranch.
And then, all of a sudden, Google Maps tells me I've reached my destination. Like all really expensive homes, you can't see anything from the street. Just lots of big trees. But there's a black SUV parked outside with two bodyguards. I must be in the right place.
As I get close to the gigantic Mediterranean-style house, I think about how I'm not really the typical fancy lady you'd expect to see arriving here, carrying a Christian Dior bag and driving a G-Wagon. I'm in a tiny Prius that probably hasn't been washed in far too long. I'm 27 years old and wearing all black. My hair is in a bowl cut and I've got a nose ring.
I look like a hipster, not a billionaire. But the woman I'm here to see, she is on her way to being a billionaire. And it's not Kris Jenner, the matriarch of the family. It's also not Kim Kardashian, the biggest star of the family, the one who started their whole dynasty just with a sex tape. It's the youngest daughter of the family, Kylie Jenner.
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Chapter 2: How did Kylie Jenner become a billionaire?
Now, I'm not a Keeping Up with the Kardashians fan. I pretty much never watch the show. Don't get me wrong, I like reality TV, but I'm more of a Love Island lover. The competition, the unpredictability of new love, the batch of fresh faces every season. The Kardashians is all about family dynamics and the family brand, and I was never interested enough to follow it closely.
But what I have been following for years is this family's business. Maybe closer than anybody else outside the family, besides their accountant. And actually, the world doesn't know Kylie's about to be a billionaire. Because despite driving a Prius, I'm a reporter for Forbes magazine, a magazine that covers wealthy people and business.
And soon, we'll be calling Kylie Jenner the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
in a world full of uncertainty one thing is constant the world's super rich will often grab our attention forbes has just released its annual billionaires list forbes does all sorts of journalism which they package with ads for very expensive watches but it's best known for making lots of lists of the richest people in the world the brass ring of american wealth culture
So a lot of people wonder how we compile the Forbes billionaires list. And it's a massive, massive undertaking. It takes many dozen reporters many, many hours to track down all of the world's billionaires.
Part of my job is to verify whether people really are billionaires. In other words, this hipster with a bowl cut was the gatekeeper of the list that all these rich and powerful people desperately wanted to be on.
My name is Kylie Kristen Jenner. I'm 23 years old. My favorite color is pink.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media, this is Infamous, and I'm Natalie Robomet. I'm Vanessa Grigorianis. And this is episode one of our series, Plumping Profits.
This week, we're talking about the Kardashians. You knew at some point that this series was going to have to talk about the Kardashians, right?
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Kylie face in her rise to fame?
Kylie and I would talk later. Here's some of our interview, which no one has ever heard before.
Kylie Cosmetics was super organic to me because I had an insecurity with my lips when I was younger. So I turned to makeup to help me feel more confident. And then, um, I went to the makeup store and I just like, I didn't even know really what colors I was picking. I was just like, I want some lip liner that looks like the color of my lips because I just want my lips to look fuller.
And so I would like overline my lips as much as possible and lipstick. And then it came to a point where even to this day, I can't leave the house without lipstick. that matched, or even the right color that was perfect for me.
Kylie's not Armenian, like her Kardashian-Hoff siblings, but she has the same dark features that characterize her family. Long brown hair, brown doe eyes, the kind of perfectly round apples of the cheeks that only filler can provide. Her face is impossibly symmetrical, and she's beautiful in a surgically serene way. The day I meet her, her hair is pulled back in a bun.
I'm struck by how quiet she is and how young she seems. Now, I've interviewed a lot of very famous people. Not a flex, it just comes with the territory. And Kylie is really different to them. When The Rock walks in a room, it's like he's arrived. He's shaking everyone's hands, giving a megawatt smile. All eyes are on him. And she's not like that.
Kylie's much softer spoken, much more self-contained. She seems so confident and out there on Instagram, but in person, she shrinks a bit. She's reserved. Like she has a wall up. But she is glamorous. Cool. An expert at posing. Exactly the kind of thing that works well on social media. Which might explain why she's so huge on it.
The really weird thing about Kylie, though, is that she grew up on TV. Kim was 27 when their reality show started airing. Kylie was 10. She didn't really have a life before the Kardashians were the Kardashians. And I can't imagine what it must do to you to internalize and normalize everything they've become known for.
Look what I can do.
This is Kylie, a long time ago, in the very first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. She's in Kris Jenner's bedroom with Kim. She's dressed in a green tank top and one of those little bolero shrugs that were popular at the time.
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Chapter 4: How does the Kardashian family influence culture?
Listen to The Big Flop wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Infamous from Campside Media.
So let's get back to the part of Kylie's body that's going to make her famous and get Forbes interested in her. The whole reason I drove out to Hidden Hills. In all of these photos and videos that Kylie's posting, all of these shots of her with Tyga, and definitely when I met her, one thing really stands out. Her lips.
They're cushiony and oversized, like king-size pillows, and painted perfectly with a matte lipstick. But they haven't always been this way. In spring 2014, people noticed that Kylie's lips have suddenly gotten a whole lot bigger. They were once a flat line, like a pencil. Now, they were giant. And just like with Kim's butt, many people think Kylie has gotten lip injections.
It becomes a thing online. Kylie denies it via tweet. But rumors keep circling. It was a real did she, didn't she.
Hey everybody, welcome back to my channel. Today I have done a little tutorial purely on how to overdraw your lips. I have seen a bit of a resurgence in overdrawing lips since Kylie Jenner.
The didn't she camp insists Kylie is just overdrawing her lips. A technique where you line your lips outside their natural borders to create the illusion of fuller lips. Drag queens do this all the time. Here's Kim Kardashian.
She, like, draws her lip, like, you know, and it looks amazing. I go into her room and I'm like, what liner do you wear? Because she only wears a lip liner. And then she fills it in.
But by April 2015, teenagers have turned this into a viral joke.
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Chapter 5: What controversies surround Kylie Cosmetics?
Yep, kids are taking shot glasses, putting them on their mouths, and then inhaling until the glass squeezed tighter and tighter around their lips. When they finally take the shot glass off however long later, their lips are swollen into a pout the same shape as the shot glass rim and Kylie's mouth.
I wanna be doing the Kylie Jenner challenge.
This is a big viral moment. And of course, the Kardashians are going to strategize how to respond to it.
I'm just not ready to talk to reporters about my lips yet because everyone always picks us apart.
After a year of denying it, Kylie finally comes clean.
I have temporary lip fillers. It's just an insecurity of mine, and it's what I wanted to do. People are so quick to judge me on everything, so I might have tiptoed around the truth, but I didn't lie.
People are pissed about it. I mean, Kylie is 17 at the time. And I imagine Chris thinks, how can we make a buck out of this? Here's what Chris said to me.
I think, you know, I love makeup. I've always loved a glam, good glam moment. And I've been that way since I'm 22 years old. You know, I always like made up my eyes and loved, you know, fashion and beauty and it kind of goes hand in hand. So we did a lot of socializing in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. So it was always something where we're getting dolled up for something.
So being able to work hand in hand with Kylie and Be able to work in this business is so amazing for me and fascinating to watch how this whole business has evolved.
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Chapter 6: How did Kylie's childhood shape her career?
Here's the difference between Dolce and Candy.
These Kylie lip kits are matte lipsticks with matching lip liners. They're called lip kits because they are, you know, two things together. In this Snapchat video, Kylie rubs the lipstick on her hand to show off the shade. This one's Candy. It's a light neutral pink.
And this one's Dolce.
Dolce is a warmer brown, like the color of caramel.
I went on the website and it immediately said sold out.
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Chapter 7: What role does social media play in Kylie's success?
Everyone knows her lips are fake. That it's not this lipstick that makes them look big. But it doesn't matter. On launch day, Kylie allegedly sells $400,000 worth of lip kits in less than 60 seconds.
Here are the swatches for all the new colors.
Three months later, in February 2016, Kylie restocks and adds three more shades. By now, the name of the company has changed from Kylie Lip Kits to Kylie Cosmetics, a sign of her growing ambition.
Dolce is the first to go.
And they all sell out.
The second to go.
Again.
This is Infamous from Campside Media.
Remember how I said that part of the Kardashian intrigue has to do with the impossibility of knowing what is real and what is fake? Well, my job as a Forbes reporter was to figure out what was real. So I began looking into Kylie Cosmetics, this apparently super fast growing business. My big question was, how much was it and Kylie Jenner really worth?
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