Style

Glow: Monaco Siblings Launch New Social Beauty Platform

RIVIERA BUZZ24 September, 20266 Mins read93

Add RIVIERA BUZZ as a preferred source on Google

Built around the idea that beauty discovery has become increasingly social, Glow brings recommendations, routines and real-world product choices together in one dedicated space. Users can share the products they use and love, discover the beauty routines of others, find recommendations and create their own personalised beauty profile.

With ambitions extending well beyond the Principality, Sophia and Harry hope to develop their Monaco-based start-up into an international platform.

We caught up with the young founders to discover where the idea for Glow came from, what sets it apart and where they hope to take it next.

The original inspiration for Glow actually came from another app, called Vivino. Harry loved the app and actively used it with friends and family. He liked how simple it made discovering a bottle of wine, seeing what other people thought about it and keeping track of what you’d tried. When Harry would rave about it, Sophia wondered why there wasn’t really an equivalent experience for beauty, something she was interested in (she’s not interested enough in wine for Vivino).

Beauty is incredibly social, but the information around individual products is still very fragmented. If you’re considering buying something, you might see it on TikTok, search for reviews on Google, check a retailer’s website, look on Reddit and then ask a friend whether they’ve actually tried it.

That’s when we started thinking about what a dedicated social platform built around beauty products could look like. Instead of the product being secondary to the content, on Glow the product is at the centre of the experience surrounded by real opinions, experiences and recommendations from the community.

I think people are starting to get a bit tired of constantly being marketed to. You go on Instagram or TikTok and it feels like every few seconds someone is telling you what product you need to buy, what’s trending, or what you should be using.

Instagram and TikTok are amazing for discovering products, but Glow is different because it’s not trying to sell you something. It’s somewhere you can actually go and see what people genuinely think about a product.

Maybe you’ve seen something on TikTok, a friend has recommended it, or you’ve picked it up in a shop and you’re wondering if it’s actually worth buying. With Glow, you can scan it and see the ratings and reviews, or see what your friends and people you trust have tried.

And then there’s the community side, which is a really big part of Glow for us. We like to say that Glow gives you access into everyone’s makeup bag. You can see what your friends / people you follow are actually using, what they love, what they don’t love, and discover products through people you actually trust.

So for us, it’s less about constantly being sold products and more about having a place where you can discover, share and get honest opinions before deciding what’s actually worth buying. It also helps with discovering new products!

How will Glow work in practice for someone joining the platform for the first time, and what do you hope will keep users coming back?

When someone joins Glow, they can immediately start exploring products, searching the catalogue or scanning products they already own or come across while shopping.

They can rate and review products they’ve used, save products they’re interested in, follow friends and other users, and discover new products through the community. At launch, Glow already has more than 60,000 beauty products across many different categories on the platform.

What we hope brings people back is that Glow becomes increasingly personal as their network grows. It’s one thing to know that a product has a certain rating; it’s much more interesting to see that three of your friends have tried it and what each of them thought.

Over time, we want someone’s Glow profile to become a reflection of their beauty world; what they use, what they’ve tried, what they love and what they want to try next.

And what we’re launching now is really only the beginning. We have an almost endless list of ideas for where we can take the platform, but we want to build those progressively and, importantly, learn from how the community actually uses Glow.

You’re brother and sister as well as business partners. How did you come to work together, and do you bring different skills and perspectives to the company?

Being brother and sister meant there was already a strong level of trust between us before Glow existed, but we also bring quite different skills to the business.

Harry has been working in tech for the past three years and naturally focuses more on the technical and business side of Glow, working closely on the product, development and the technology behind the platform.

Sophia focuses more on the creative and content side: how Glow looks and feels, how we communicate with the community and how we create content around the brand. As a content creator herself, she also manages Glow’s social media.

There’s obviously plenty of overlap, and we challenge each other’s ideas constantly, but we think the combination works particularly well for Glow. We’re trying to build both a technology platform and a consumer brand, so having those different perspectives from the beginning has been really valuable.

Why did you choose to build and launch Glow from Monaco, and has being based in the Principality influenced the development of the business?

Monaco is home for us, so it was natural that Glow would begin here.

At the same time, Monaco is an interesting place to build an internationally focused company. It’s incredibly international for its size, and you’re constantly surrounded by people from different countries, cultures and industries. That naturally encourages you to think beyond one domestic market.

Glow has never been conceived as a Monaco-only platform. We’re building it from Monaco with the ambition for the community to become international, and that’s been part of our thinking from the very start.

Authenticity is becoming increasingly important in beauty recommendations. How will Glow distinguish genuine user recommendations from paid promotion, influencer marketing or sponsored content?

Glow is built for everyday people sharing honest experiences, not for influencer marketing. We want recommendations to come from people who have actually tried a product and can say what worked for them and what didn’t.

Influencers are welcome to use Glow, but the platform isn’t designed to support paid reviews or sponsored recommendations. We don’t have an ad toggle because paid promotion isn’t what we expect reviews to be. If someone does post paid or sponsored content, we trust them to be transparent and clearly disclose it.

Ultimately, Glow depends on its community being honest with one another. A genuine negative review is just as valuable as a positive one.

You have international ambitions for Glow. Where would you like to see the platform in three to five years, and what would success ultimately look like for you both?

In three to five years, we’d like someone considering a beauty product anywhere in the world to instinctively think, “I’ll check it on Glow.” We also want Glow to become part of people’s routine as soon as they try something: a natural place to share what they thought with their friends.

That means building a huge international product catalogue, but more importantly, a community around it. The real value isn’t simply having millions of products in a database; it’s having millions of genuine experiences, opinions and conversations attached to those products.

We see Glow becoming a major content platform in its own right. We don’t want our content to exist purely to advertise the app. We want to build a recognisable beauty media presence around Glow, with entertaining, informative and culturally relevant content that people want to follow whether or not they’re using the app.

Ultimately, we’d like Glow to sit at the intersection of beauty, community, content and commerce: somewhere you can discover what’s happening in beauty, see what your friends and the wider community are using, share your own experiences and make more informed decisions about what to buy.

We know we’re only getting started. The app launching on September 30 is the foundation, and there are countless ideas we want to build on as Glow and its community grow.

A big thank you to Sophia and Harry for taking the time to speak with us. Their enthusiasm, ambition and entrepreneurial spirit certainly bode well for the future. We wish them every success with Glow and look forward to following their journey as the platform develops and grows.

Glow has been in development for over two years. The Glow app launches on 30 September, 2026, with a catalogue of more than 60,000 beauty products across a wide range of categories.