Bobbi Brown, makeup artist, author, and founder of her namesake cosmetics line, has decided to leave her company. In this letter, she reflects on the last 27 years, and looks forward to her next chapter. In February 1991, Bobbi Brown Essentials launched at Bergdorf Goodman on a small table in the middle of the iconic New York City makeup floor. My husband Steven and I, with our founding partners Rosalind and Ken Landis, created a company with one purpose: to teach women just how simple makeup could be. But it actually started a few years before that. Recently married and pregnant, I moved out of the city and decided that I didn’t want to travel as an editorial makeup artist anymore. I had a simple idea for a lipstick that actually looked like the color of women’s lips and, thanks to my years of experience on set, I knew that no two were the same. I designed 10 brown-based shades in a color collection that was creamy, matte, odorless, and could be mixed and blended to create unique, individual hues. It was a simple concept, but one that seemed revolutionary at the time. I sold them out of our house by mailing or hand-delivering them to people who had heard about them through word of mouth. Back then, the lipsticks were packaged in manila envelopes with ingredient cards placed on the inside. When Leslie Seymour, a beauty editor at Glamour, wrote about them, that’s when the phone started ringing off the hook. Then, after a random encounter with a Bergdorf Goodman cosmetics buyer, we sold our first lipstick on counter in February of 1991. Four years later, we sold the company to Estée Lauder and I remained involved as chief creative officer.