BELLA Magazine was a proud media partner of the Personalized Beauty Summit this spring in San Francisco. The two-day event was the destination for beauty technology innovation and emerging indie beauty brands, driving personalized and digital innovation in beauty and personal care. The summit’s headline retail partner, Alibaba, was also joined by notable speakers from top beauty brands, such as Ulta Beauty, Unilever, Codex, e.l.f. cosmetics, and Shiseido, to name a few. BELLA also hosted a digital voting system prior to the summit, to award one of 12 Beauty Tech Spotlight finalists with the title of “BELLA Fan Favorite.” Cosmixxology, along with its founder, Malha Bly, outshined the competition and captured our attention as a leader in beauty technology and innovation.

Malha Bly is the CEO and founder of Cosmixxology, a multi-patented ecosystem with its own platform created to analyze, customize, and dispense clean, natural hair and skincare products. The ecosystem is comprised of a handheld analyzer, mobile application, and a machine with embedded software. The Cosmixx Elite is an interactive kiosk that allows users to stand in front of the unit, which performs their analysis customizes and dispenses. From working as an on-campus hairstylist while attending Eastern Michigan University, to attending cosmetology school and making a career change out of manufacturing and into IT, Malha understood the importance of hard work and responsibility in pursuing her dreams while also raising her daughter. In fact, it was her daughter who served as her initial inspiration for getting into beauty and haircare. Malha recalls struggling to find the right products suited for her daughter’s unique hair color and texture. “I created my own products at home on the stove, and eventually started my own line, called Couture Mane Concepts,” Malha says. “I later founded The Hair Gym L.L.C. in 2015, where I learned which products the market did and didn’t have a need for. From there, I fused my knowledge of cosmetology, information technology, and business to create Cos-mixx-ology, the science of ‘mixxing’ your own customized cosmetics, with the COSmixx machine.” Malha’s goal is to provide clean, health-conscious products for everyone’s beauty needs, especially those in the BIPOC community, in what she calls the “empowering the reconstruction of the beauty movement.”