It’s hard out there for emerging beauty brands.

What’s a new brand to do when you want to get your name out, and don’t have the media muscle of a beauty conglomerate behind you? Your options are:

1. Scrounge up big money for advertising in the major print beauty magazines.
2. Try to establish contact with busy beauty editors via desk sides or product samples, and hope that your brand doesn’t get lost in the beauty closet.
3. Pitch your products to online beauty sites and bloggers.
4. Try to get your product included in a beauty subscription box (also expensive, as producing samples en masse is expensive).
5. Hustle, hustle via the QVC route (like Leslie Blodgett, the Bare Escentuals prophetess).

Brands have achieved success via all of the methods above. Even Bobbi Brown was a small-time beauty line with five natural lipstick shades until Jean Godfrey-June wrote about them in Vogue, but with the confluence of existing brands that launch new products everyday, is it any surprise that new and up-and-coming brands sometimes fall through the cracks? There’s no CFDA-equivalent fund for beauty brands (although maybe there should be!).

Fortunately for you Fashionista readers, I am devoted to the cause of making sure those new beauty brands don’t slip through the undiscovered abyss. So here’s a list of five fantastic beauty upstarts whose products I’ve tried and loved, that deserve your attention and notice. Click through to discover new products to love.