Rather than lemons into lemonade, Hannah Chody spent much of the past three years turning Golden Peach into Bellini. This month, the creator with over 387,000 followers made headlines—and smashed sales rankings—after creating Bellini, a shimmery rose-gold eye shadow made in collaboration with Saie that’s based on a discontinued Tom Ford Beauty hue called Golden Peach.
There’s clearly an opportunity here for brands and creators alike. Bellini launched on October 15 as a permanent addition to Saie’s SuperSuede Baked Eyeshadows collection and was an immediate hit. It sold out in just a few hours, according to the Business of Fashion, and Saie also reported that it was the most searched-for brand on Sephora’s website that day. (Sephora confirmed Saie was among the top-searched brands that day.) “An exclusive gift set available on TikTok Shop that included Bellini allegedly “set a new record for the highest unit sales of any featured brand to date on the platform,” according to Business of Fashion. (A TikTok representative declined to comment when reached for confirmation.) The idea of the influencer collab is anything but novel—who could forget Jaclyn Hill’s Champagne Pop highlighter with Becca (RIP). There have been a ton more recent ones, too, however it’s still pretty rare to see a brand co-create something and keep it around permanently.
Let’s back up: The Golden Peach ordeal began on March 4, 2023, when the influencer posted a video about shade, what she then thought was her new ride-or-die eye shadow. “It is the absolute perfect color, it looks good on everyone and it lasts forever,” she said on TikTok. Little did she know Golden Peach was no longer in production. She discovered the devastating information thanks to a comment from a follower and promptly set out to find a replacement (after buying two more pots of the stuff for safe-keeping). And so, a content series was born.
Chody posted the first video of her eye shadow search on August 8, 2023, and tried two products: the Hourglass Voyeur Eyeshadow Stick in Prism, a cool rose gold that wasn’t pink enough, and Sisley Paris Ombre Eclat Liquide Eyeshadow in shade 3, a pink rose that had too many sparkles but not enough copper. The series continued: brands sent her products for free, and she continued to make Sephora runs, purchasing her own possible dupes. “Towards the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024 was when the series was going super viral and it gained so much momentum,” she tells Allure. “I kept going because people kept suggesting [more] and new eye shadows were brought to the market, and it evolved from there.”