Telling Stories, Selling Beauty - NYTimes.com WEST CHESTER, PA. - "Hold on to your panties because I'm about to tell you a story," said Mally Roncal, a makeup artist and the founder of the makeup line Mally Beauty, looking straight into the camera at the QVC studio here. As Ms. Roncal, 41, all flouncy hair and eyelashes, spun her tale on live television, production assistants stood at the ready with rolling trays of products for the next promotions, which would include an eyeliner library and a Disco Diva collection in a faux snakeskin pouch. Albany Irvin, a QVC host dressed in a tightfitting hot-pink dress, listened intently as Ms. Roncal described her 20-year quest to create a mascara by combining an Italian formula, Japanese pigments and a French lash comb. Ms. Roncal then demonstrated how to apply the product on one of the 17 models she had hired for the show. Ms. Irvin, noting enthusiastically how good she thought it looked on the model, said, "My mama would never let me put it on my bottom lashes "cause she said I'd look like a floozy." "But you know what?" said Ms. Roncal, who created Beyoncé"s look for her performance at the last presidential inauguration. You can and you should. The mascara was being sold in a "supersize set of six" for $60, she added, or "three easy payments" of $20 each. Estée Lauder might cringe, but this is how modern beauty empires are built on QVC, one of the largest television shopping networks in the world. Since its premiere there eight years ago, Mally Beauty has sold more than seven million units within the United States, according to the cosmetics company, headquartered in Baltimore. And products of Lauder-owned companies, like Clinique and Bobbi Brown, are now sold there, too. The channel has come a long way in the beauty business since 2005, when it began selling a handful of brands, including Laura Geller, Bare Escentuals and Philosophy. QVC's main competitor, HSN in St. Petersburg, Fla., also sells cosmetics, concentrating recently on promotions linked to movies and television, like Urban Decay's Glinda and Theodora eye shadow palettes themed to the film "Oz the Great and Powerful," 3,000 of which were sold in less than an hour of airtime last spring, and celebrity scents, like Mary J. Blige's My Life fragrance (60,000 units sold within six hours of airtime in 2010). But QVC has become a dominant player in cosmetics, even the kind that one formerly might have expected to find only at department-store counters. Perhaps this is because the channel has aggressively invested in the category, building a new set for beauty programming, with special lighting for close-ups and a lounge and makeup studio for models. Its beauty category represents 16 percent of its domestic business, up from 9 percent in 2003, the channel said. QVC has shipped more than $5 billion in beauty products globally since 2009. "Our customer told us very clearly that she wanted to see more beauty, and we saw that our format of connecting the customer directly with the expert was well suited for beauty product demonstrations," said Claudia Lucas, QVC's beauty director. There was an appetite. Eighty-three percent of QVC's customers are female, and almost half of them are 45 to 64, according to research provided by the company. But not every line popular with this demographic sells well on air. "We learned that unless you do something with a major brand in a really original way, customers won't respond," Ms. Lucas said. It's all about finding something that's authentic, that's credible, that has a strong and compelling story and reason why someone would want this product. Such storytelling has worked for fragrances like those sold by Philosophy, which one might think would be difficult to sell on television, since viewers can't smell them and don't have the associations they might with Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds, a QVC chestnut.