The Wrong Lipstick That Started Everything

I need to tell you about a lipstick.

It was a pretty shade — one of those warm nude-pinks that looks good on literally everyone in the online swatches. My daughter Liv picked it out. She was so excited. She tried it on in the car outside the store, looked in the mirror, and her face just fell.

It didn't look bad. It looked off. Like she was wearing someone else's color. And she couldn't explain why.

Neither could I. I just knew that feeling — the one where something about a shade is wrong but you can't put your finger on it. Every woman I know has had that moment. You pick something that looks beautiful in the tube, put it on, and suddenly you look tired, or washed out, or like you're trying too hard.

That's what Liv said in the car. And she said it the way only a teenager can — like it was obvious, like of course someone should have built that already. And the thing is, she was right. It should exist. But it didn't.

The Kitchen Table

We're a homeschooling family in Oklahoma. Liv is a ballerina. She dances five days a week, she loves makeup, and she's the kind of kid who asks a question and won't let go until she finds the answer.

So we went looking for the answer. We Googled "why did that lipstick look wrong on me" and ended up deep in the world of color analysis. Undertones. Seasonal palettes. The reason a warm coral that's perfect on one person can look terrible on someone with the same skin tone but different undertone.

It clicked. We signed up for color analysis classes. We learned about the 12-season system — not just "warm or cool" but the specific sub-seasons that explain why two warm-toned people can still wear completely different shades. Liv turned out to be a Soft Summer. I'm a True Summer. Same family, different palettes.

And then came the bigger question: if we know our seasons, why isn't there an app that can take any product off the shelf and tell us if it matches?

Learning to Code

Neither of us is a developer. I'm a mom. Liv is a teenager. But we both have the same stubborn streak, and when we decide to do something, we do it.

We started learning to code together at the same kitchen table where we do schoolwork. We took classes. We watched tutorials. We read documentation until our eyes blurred. Some nights I'd stay up late trying to fix a bug while Liv was at dance practice, and she'd come home and show me a better way to do it.

The hardest part wasn't the code. It was the color data. We had to build a database of products — real products, real shades — and score each one against all 12 seasons. That meant going shade by shade, evaluating undertone, depth, and clarity, and assigning a YAY, OKAY, or NAY for each season.

Over 1,000 products. Hand-scored. By a mom and her daughter, at a kitchen table, in Oklahoma.

What TruHue Became

What started as "why isn't there an app for this?" became a real app. TruHue finds your season, scores any product against your palette, and keeps track of everything you've ever scanned, searched, or saved. It has a Makeup Bag Audit that scans your entire collection and tells you which products to keep, which are just okay, and which to consider replacing.

It's the app we wished existed in that car outside the store. And we built it ourselves.

I won't pretend it was easy. There were weeks where nothing worked. There were moments where I thought, "We're a mom and a teenager — who are we to build an app?" But then Liv would come up with a feature idea that was so good it kept us going. And slowly, piece by piece, TruHue came together.

Why I'm Telling You This

Because I think it matters that TruHue comes from real life. It wasn't focus-grouped or venture-funded or designed by people who've never stood in a drugstore aisle wondering which shade of "nude" actually matches their skin.

It was built by two people who had a problem and decided to solve it. A mom who learned to code in her 40s. A daughter who dances six days a week and still finds time to obsess over lipstick swatches.

We built TruHue for you because we built it for us first. And if that wrong lipstick moment ever happened to you — the one where you look in the mirror and think "this isn't it" — TruHue is the app that makes sure it doesn't happen again.