Kylie Jenner, the lip-kit founder trying to be believed as an actor

Kylie Jenner

Photo: Marc Zapanta / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 10, 1997 Los Angeles
Occupation	Model

Attention has never been Kylie Jenner’s problem. Belief has. She has lived nearly her whole life in front of a camera and very little of it being taken at her word: the fuller lips she first credited to lip liner, the company a business magazine crowned and then accused of inflated numbers, the novel that carried her name and was written by somebody else. Her next project asks the audience for a stranger kind of trust. In the Hulu thriller Bachelorette Weekend she is set to play a bride found dead in a pool, a woman whose closest friends all had reasons to want her gone. For the first time, a face that hundreds of millions of people follow online would be asked to disappear into someone who is not Kylie Jenner.

That face was public long before it was a product. Jenner grew up in Los Angeles, the younger daughter of Kris Jenner and the Olympic decathlon champion Caitlyn Jenner, and the last child in a crowded household that included her sister Kendall and her half-sisters Kourtney, Kim and Khloé Kardashian. She was ten when E! began broadcasting Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and she spent the next fourteen years and twenty seasons growing up on it.

She attended Sierra Canyon School, switched to home schooling in 2012 and finished her diploma through Laurel Springs School in July 2015, weeks before her eighteenth birthday on August 10. By then she was already a licensing operation. With Kendall she lent her name to clothing lines at PacSun and Topshop, to nail lacquers, handbags and jewelry, and to a dystopian young-adult novel, Rebels: City of Indra, published in 2014. Its ghostwriter, Maya Sloan, later said the sisters had supplied a two-page outline. The teenage years taught Jenner what her name was worth to other people’s companies. The obvious next step was to stop renting it out.

The product came out of a confession. In a 2015 episode of the family show she admitted to lip fillers after long insisting the change was lip liner, and that same year she put the look on sale: the Kylie Lip Kit, a liquid lipstick and matching liner sold online and announced through her own social accounts. The first run was 15,000 kits. By February 2016, when the business was renamed Kylie Cosmetics, production had climbed to 500,000. A spin-off series, Life of Kylie, followed in 2017, and the skincare line Kylie Skin arrived in May 2019. The model was simple and hard to copy: the founder was the marketing department, and the audience that had watched her face change for a decade was the customer base.

In November 2019 Coty, the owner of CoverGirl and Rimmel, paid $600 million for 51 percent of Kylie Cosmetics, valuing the company at about $1.2 billion. The brand reported roughly $177 million in revenue over the previous year, and Jenner stayed on as its creative face. Coty relaunched the line in 2021 with vegan formulas and wider international retail, while Jenner kept building around her own name: Kylie Baby, a swimwear line that drew complaints about quality, the fashion label Khy in 2023 and a canned vodka soda, Sprinter, in 2024.

The business has always come with an asterisk, and Jenner put some of it there herself. In 2019 Forbes called her the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, a label that had already drawn ridicule for its “self-made” half, given the family she was born into. A year later the magazine reversed itself, saying the company was smaller and less profitable than her camp had presented and that she had “likely forged” tax returns. Jenner denied it, writing that she had never asked for any title or tried to lie her way there. Both versions can hold at once: the company was real and valuable, and the myth around it was inflated. Other disputes followed the same pattern of image against ownership. In 2017 the Australian singer Kylie Minogue defeated her attempt to trademark the name Kylie in the United States. In 2026 three former household employees filed lawsuits in Los Angeles alleging harassment, discrimination and wage violations; they are allegations, not findings, and no court has ruled on them.

The pivot under way now is toward the screen, and it is being made carefully. Before this year her acting record amounted to a cameo as herself in Ocean’s 8 and a voice role in the NBC special Trolls: Holiday in Harmony. Her first real film part came in The Moment, the A24 feature built around Charli XCX and directed by Aidan Zamiri, which premiered at Sundance and opened in American cinemas on January 30, 2026, with Jenner playing a caricature of herself. Self-parody was a safe first step. Bachelorette Weekend is not. In early October 2026 Deadline reported that Hulu was finalizing a straight-to-series order for the thriller, adapted by Lauren Oliver from an unpublished book by Flora Collins, with Jenner as star and executive producer and Kim Kardashian also producing. The same week, the eighth season of The Kardashians, the family’s Hulu series since 2022, began streaming on October 8.

Her private life remains part of the public record, by design and by default. She has two children with the rapper Travis Scott, Stormi, born in 2018, and Aire, born in 2022; the couple separated in early 2023. That year she began a relationship with Timothée Chalamet, who spoke about her from the stage in January 2026 when he accepted a Critics Choice award for Marty Supreme. In January 2022 she became the first woman to reach 300 million followers on Instagram, the audience that still functions as her storefront. She is also an ambassador for Smile Train, the charity that funds cleft lip and palate surgery for children.

Hulu has not set a premiere date for Bachelorette Weekend, and the new season of The Kardashians rolls out weekly through the autumn. Between the two sits the question her whole career has been circling: whether viewers who have studied every version of her face will accept it as somebody else’s.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, Charli XCX, The Kardashians, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner