Sunscreen is the vegetables of skincare: everyone knows you should use it, almost nobody is excited about it. Then Winnie Harlow strolled in and made SPF feel like a vibe.
From Runway Trailblazer to Brand Boss
Harlow first captured the world's attention as a model whose vitiligo made her instantly iconic on runways and in campaigns. But being a muse was never the endgame. Having spent years navigating an industry, and a skincare aisle, that rarely centered skin like hers, she had a pointed perspective: sun care was clinical, chalky, and weirdly exclusionary, especially for people with deeper skin tones who were tired of ghostly white casts.
So she launched Cay Skin, a sun-care brand born from her own life as someone whose skin requires real protection and real care. The mission was personal, which is exactly why it landed.
Turning SPF Into a Whole Mood
The creative play here is chef's-kiss. Cay Skin leaned into an island-luxury aesthetic, think golden, glowy, vacation-in-a-bottle energy, that reframed sunscreen as a glow-giving treat rather than a chore. The packaging was warm and aspirational, the formulas designed to melt in without that dreaded white cast, and the whole brand world felt like a beach holiday you could keep in your bag.
Cay Skin didn't sell protection from the sun. It sold the feeling of glowing in it.
And Harlow brought her built-in superpower: a massive, devoted following and a face that already symbolized celebrating your skin exactly as it is. She didn't just slap her name on a label, she made inclusivity the product thesis, formulating and marketing for the full range of skin tones the category had long ignored. The marketing was sun-soaked, joyful, and unmistakably hers.
Riding the Glow to Real Growth
The brand rode the wave of the modern beauty boom, landing in major retailers and building real buzz in an increasingly crowded sun-care space. While young brands keep their exact numbers close, Cay Skin earned a reputation as one of the more credible celebrity-founded beauty ventures, precisely because it solved a problem Harlow had actually lived, rather than chasing a trend.
That authenticity is the whole game. Plenty of famous faces launch beauty lines; far fewer launch one that fills a genuine gap with genuine point of view. Harlow turned a lifetime of being looked at into a business about being taken care of.
She made the most ignored step in skincare the most desirable one, proof that the right founder can make even SPF 30 feel like main-character energy.