MILI Cosmetics

MILI Cosmetics is a Swedish beauty brand based in Stockholm, founded by makeup-artist and entrepreneur Mika Liias, who had earlier created the cosmetics company Make Up Store. It sells colour cosmetics together with skincare and body care, chiefly through its own Swedish-language webshop and Swedish retailers, and positions itself around clean, vegan formulas paired with a bold, colourful approach to makeup.

The brand emerged as a personal comeback. After Make Up Store went bankrupt and its assets were acquired, Liias returned with MILI as what he has described as a redemption for himself [8]. Sources disagree on exactly when the brand launched: Dagens Handel reported MILI as already up and running by mid-2022 [8], while retailer copy from Lyko and the trade press describe it as launching "two years after Make Up Store's bankruptcy," which points to around 2023 [5]. The harder-dated evidence places the launch in 2022.

⚑ Thinner sourcing. The article relies largely on the brand's own statements (T2–T3). Glowpedia is seeking independent sources.

MILI Cosmetics was started by Mika Liias, a Swedish entrepreneur with a long history in the cosmetics industry. He was the sole founder of Make Up Store, where he worked for many years as designer and product developer. Lyko, which describes him as "the multiple award-winning entrepreneur Mika Liias," notes that the Swedish press has often referred to him as a "makeup king" and "makeup guru" [5]; these are press and retailer characterisations rather than documented, named awards.

Liias has spoken openly about the difficulty of the period that preceded the new brand. In a 2022 interview with Dagens Handel he said it was hard to stay away after 25 years in the industry and that he still felt he had a great deal left to give, which resulted in the new brand [8]. The venture was conceived as e-commerce, and according to reporting from the same period the webshop opened with roughly 400 products spanning makeup, makeup tools and skincare.

The MILI name has a longer lineage than the cosmetics line itself. In autumn 1990, Liias founded a makeup-artistry school, originally called IMC (International Makeup Center) and later associated with the MILI Beauty Academy, which trains makeup artists for work in beauty, fashion, television, film and stage from premises in central Stockholm [4]. The academy predates and is distinct from the MILI Cosmetics product brand.

The cosmetics brand itself dates to the period after Make Up Store's collapse. Make Up Store, which Liias had founded around 25 years earlier, entered bankruptcy and was acquired; in a later interview he described scaling from some 300 employees down to two in the aftermath [7]. MILI Cosmetics followed as his return to the market, framed across Swedish trade-press coverage as a comeback after what one Market headline called "the nightmare years" [6].

MILI Cosmetics is an independent, founder-led brand; no parent company is recorded in the available sources. It is separate from Make Up Store, whose brand and assets passed to the retailer Lyko out of bankruptcy.

The company frames beauty as open-minded and rule-free. On its vision page it states that the definition of beauty differs for each individual, but that for MILI it is about "an open-minded, no rule and creative artistry." The brand ties this to a Nordic sensibility, describing itself as bringing "the nordic perception of clean natural beauty" into its work and pairing clean, natural ideas with colourful and out-of-the-ordinary expression. Its stated mission is to provide the latest and most up-to-date beauty products on the market, and it uses the tagline "When makeup makes it happen."

MILI's range covers colour cosmetics alongside skincare and body care, with makeup brushes and accessories. Lyko summarises the assortment as "trendy, clean beauty and color cosmetics as well as skin and body care" [5]. Products the brand highlights include the Big Makeup Blender, the Mascara Dreamia, a Lip Shine and a concealer.

On formulation, the brand presents itself as clean and vegan. According to Lyko's brand page, the products are vegan and free from PFAS and parabens, and ingredients such as talc, silicone and microplastics are avoided, along with palm and mineral oil as far as possible [5]. The brand also describes its packaging as recyclable and positions itself against greenwashing, emphasising sustainable ingredients and animal-welfare considerations.

Swedish trade press has covered the brand and its founder, including a feature in Dagens Handel in 2022 and executive interviews in Market in 2023 [6]. No specific industry awards for MILI Cosmetics are documented in the available sources.

MILI Cosmetics is active. It operates a live Swedish-language e-commerce site with current product collections and is distributed through Swedish retailers such as Lyko, Apotea and Apohem. Its primary market appears to be Sweden, and the most recent documented activity is a trade-press executive interview from late 2023 together with the live webshop.