LOS ANGELES, CA – The entertainment industry is reeling this week after B-list actress Skylar Valencia-Rodriguez shocked Hollywood by launching a beauty company that sells actual products to real customers, rather than simply posting Instagram stories with discount codes.
“I honestly thought she’d lost her mind,” confided Valencia-Rodriguez’s talent agent, speaking on condition of anonymity while frantically googling “what is inventory management.” “When she told me she wanted to start a business, I immediately connected her with our usual influencer partnership team. But then she started talking about ‘manufacturing costs’ and ‘supply chains’ and I knew something had gone terribly wrong.”
Valencia-Rodriguez’s company, “Authentique Beauty,” has baffled industry insiders by featuring products that exist in physical form and can be purchased without entering promo codes. The actress spent eighteen months developing formulations, testing products, and establishing relationships with manufacturers—a process that celebrity business experts describe as “unnecessarily complicated.”
“The traditional celebrity business model is elegant in its simplicity,” explained Hollywood entrepreneur consultant Richard Brand-Extension. “Step one: License your name to an existing product. Step two: Post about it twice a month with a swipe-up link. Step three: collect royalty checks. Skylar’s approach of actually creating things is frankly disruptive to our entire ecosystem.”
The launch has created widespread confusion among Valencia-Rodriguez’s fanbase, who are accustomed to celebrity “businesses” that consist primarily of Instagram posts and occasional podcast sponsorships.
“I tried to buy her lipstick using the code SKYLAR20 but there was no code?” posted confused fan @StanSkylar4Ever. “Instead there was this weird thing called a ‘shopping cart’ and they wanted my actual address? Is this some kind of elaborate ARG?”
Industry rivals are reportedly panicking. Sources close to reality TV star Brittany Glamour-Johnson revealed that her team is “scrambling” after Authentique Beauty’s launch, with emergency meetings focused on “whether we actually need to manufacture the protein powder we’ve been selling for six months.”
The situation has reportedly reached crisis levels when Valencia-Rodriguez announced plans to hire customer service representatives and establish a return policy.
“Customer service? Returns?” gasped celebrity beauty mogul Essence Sterling-Brand during a hastily arranged video conference. “But what happens when people aren’t satisfied with just seeing our faces on the packaging? What if they expect the products to… work?”
Wall Street analysts remain skeptical of Valencia-Rodriguez’s unorthodox approach. “Her business model seems to rely heavily on customer satisfaction and product quality,” noted investment firm Bubble & Associates in a concerned memo to clients. “This represents a significant departure from the proven celebrity venture strategy of ‘post and pray.'”
Valencia-Rodriguez, reached for comment while personally quality-testing a new foundation shade, seemed unaware of the chaos she had unleashed.
“I just wanted to make products that I would actually use,” she said, apparently missing the revolutionary nature of her statement. “Isn’t that what businesses are supposed to do?”
At press time, the Screen Actors Guild was reportedly forming an emergency committee to investigate whether Valencia-Rodriguez’s actions violated the unwritten rules of celebrity entrepreneurship.