There are more than 7.5 million people in Hong Kong, but only one person who has capitalised on the US beauty market the way Sarah Cheung has. The Hong Kong-born-and-raised content creator co-founded skincare and beauty brand Sacheu with Gloss Ventures in 2020. By 2023, their peel-off lip liner made them a viral sensation, catapulting the company into headlines and coveted makeup bags of celebrities like Billie Eilish and Kim Kardashian—no seeding involved.
In January 2025, Sacheu became Amazon’s 10th highest-performing beauty and personal care brand for an entire week, and its Lip Liner STAY-N® has been the top-selling lip liner on Amazon for over a year. On TikTok Shop US, one Lip Liner STAY-N® was sold every six seconds, and at Ulta Beauty, demand was so high that the brand broke the retailer’s “Notify Me When In Stock” email limit of 200,000—an unprecedented milestone for any brand.
Cheung’s exceptional success is few and far between, yet her early life in Hong Kong feels so familiar and relatable that it could easily resemble that of one of my closest friends. Until age 15, Cheung attended a reputable Catholic all-girls school in Hong Kong, St. Paul’s Convent, and would spend her after-school hours with friends in Causeway Bay. After Cheung’s local school upbringing, her parents sent her to different cities to explore better educational opportunities. She eventually earned a scholarship to UT Austin and graduated with a degree in philosophy. Since then, she’s spent 5 years in Toronto and settled in Los Angeles in late 2023.
“Every time I come back to Hong Kong, it feels even more real that this kind of stuff isn’t supposed to happen to a girl from Hong Kong,” Cheung muses, sipping on an iced Matchali latte as we chat at the Green Room at Upper House.
Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Cheung. Collage by Talia Tom
When she arrived earlier that morning in a silky white outfit and hair slicked back into a ponytail, our formal handshake quickly melted into an easy hug. She introduced her fiancé, Carlo, who had accompanied her to the restaurant. They had gotten engaged just a few days earlier, and she laughed as she recounted how she was responding to my email when Carlo interrupted her, insisting they go to the beach near her mother’s home—where he surprised her with a proposal. She’d given him a bit of grief for it, not knowing what was coming.
As we talked about growing up in this city, Cheung revealed how she learned to embrace her differences — lessons she would later leverage as her edge. “I grew up as a fat girl,” Cheung states matter-of-factly. “If you’re born and raised here, you know how strict the beauty standards can be. I was so far away from the ideal that it was kind of liberating, because everyone was playing that game, but I wasn’t going to win that game anyway, so I might as well not play it.”
She recalls being 13 when she played around with eyeliner for the first time at the MAC Cosmetics counter that just opened in Causeway Bay. In that instant, she felt makeup’s transformative power. Makeup mirrored her belief: you don’t have to play by the rules. “I was such a tomboy before, and then putting on makeup for the first time was so transformative and liberating.” Her passion for beauty and makeup was cemented from that moment forward.
By her sophomore year of university, she had picked up all sorts of makeup skills from YouTube tutorials and decided to start her own channel, Sacheu. Today, she has more than 870,000 subscribers. Her early videos were the likes of everyday makeup routines, lash tutorials, and study tips for achieving her 4.0 GPA. Gradually, her relationship with her audience was likened to that of an older sister as she openly peeled back personal subjects like mental health and weight loss—even documenting the process of getting an IUD, which close to 1 million have watched.
“I’ve been a content creator for 10 years now, and I have developed a pretty good instinct,” Cheung notes, reflecting on how a decade of creating content has sharpened her understanding of what resonates with people. But her innate ability to identify business opportunities can be traced back to her earliest entrepreneurial ventures.
At just 6 years old, Cheung recognised the popularity of Muji cotton candy among her classmates, bought the coveted sweets from the newly opened Taikoo Shing store, and resold them at school. Though her business was eventually banned, her entrepreneurial streak was undeniable.
At 19, she launched a small-scale skincare brand, Signature by Sarah, which successfully sold out. “Through so many different stages of my life, I’ve always wanted to do something like this, and Sacheu is the first brand that scaled to the size,” Cheung reflects.
Through so many different stages of my life, I've always wanted to do something like this, and Sacheu is the first brand that scaled to the size.
Sarah Cheung, Sacheu Co-founder
In 2021, Cheug was approached by Gloss Ventures, an investment holding company focused on “creator-fueled omni-channel brands”. The first products they launched were the Stainless Steel Facial Roller and the Stainless Steel Gua Sha Tool.
At the time, Gloss Ventures was an investor in predictive intelligence platform Cherry Pick AI Inc, which was used to mine social media data to identify market trends and conduct pre–launch product feedback loops. They predicted the rise of stainless steel beauty tools, or in other words, the market finally caught up to what Cheung’s grandmother had already been doing decades ago.
“When I was younger, I used to do sleepovers with [my grandmother],” Cheung reminisces. “Every time we did sleepovers, I would just play with everything she owned. And one of the things was her roller. I was probably four at the time. It was one of the first beauty tools I’ve ever touched, and she would teach me how to use it. It’s amazing I get to share a very fond memory of her with the world.” Since her grandmother’s passing in 2022, Cheung’s mother has brought Sacheu tools like the beauty roller to Cheung’s grandmother’s grave so she would know “the legacy that she’s left on the world”.
The success of these Traditional Chinese Medicine-inspired beauty tools proved to Cheung the power of authenticity. “It was a trend in the West, but it was always a part of my life. Sticking to it—knowing that there’s going to be a moment in time when the world resonates with your story, and introducing your heritage—is important.”
When it comes to product development, Cheung says she will “never say no” to drawing from her heritage, but emphasises that it’s just one component of establishing themselves as an innovative brand.
At the drawing board, the process begins by thinking about what people want in their beauty routines—insights Cheung gathers directly from her community of customers and fans, whether through in-person conversations at pop-ups or feedback in the comments section. From there, she and her team study market benchmarks, analysing the best products on the market to identify their limitations and figure out how to improve on them. “If we’re very lucky, three iterations of the sample,” Cheung chuckles at the rarity of such a smooth development process. “But usually, it’s going to be 10-plus iterations to make sure we really get the formula right.” Then, they turn their focus to packaging, searching for components that are both “pretty” and “intuitive”. Sometimes the whole process takes 7 months, but other times it takes more than 2 years.
Sarah Cheung and the Lip Liner STAY-N®
Photo: Courtesy of Sarah Cheung
Sacheu’s hero product, the Lip Liner STAY-N®, has over 4 billion views on TikTok. It promises smudge-proof, long-lasting results, but Cheung believes its virality goes beyond performance. “I think one of the things that made us go so viral is how silly you look, and it looks so scary!” Cheung says, grinning. Once you trace your lips with the lip liner, a dark film forms, leaving you with lips of a Roy Lichtenstein character for 10-20 minutes before you can peel the film off. When social media content is condensed to mere minutes, if not seconds, “compelling and effective” storytelling that can instantly hook the viewer is essential. For Cheung, part of that storytelling is about not taking beauty too seriously. “Making sure makeup is fun goes back to defining beauty on your own terms.”
Lip liners aside, how does one actually do that? Cheung’s answer is unexpectedly, refreshingly, straightforward: Touch grass. “I look at how my mother and my grandmother aged, and how they look so beautiful throughout my whole life, and I think that is what you need to pay attention to. It’s so easy for us to recognise the beauty in our mothers and our sisters, but it’s so difficult for us to see it in ourselves. So I think pay attention to that more than what’s marketed to you in the media.”
Even when Cheung reflects on the most fulfilling moments of this entrepreneurial journey, it’s the people she pays attention to—those who surround her, whom she hopes to make proud, and those she’s never met but who she is wholeheartedly rooting for. “I really hope that for anyone growing up, wanting a woman here as an example, but feels like there’s this glass ceiling or no way out, that they can see what I’ve done—that is what motivates me, and the most emotional part of it all. I hope that I’m opening doors for people.”
