Midway through its renaissance, Borghese Skincare is building off of the success of a hero product.
The brand is debuting Fango Purificante, a purifying mud mask for face and body, which will retail starting Monday for $56 on the brand’s website.
The treatment builds off of the success of the brand’s original Fango mask. “We haven’t launched a new Fango product in several years. We just had two,” said Dawn Hilarczyk, chief operating officer of Borghese, who said the impetus for the launch came from an unlikely place.
“I have been using Reddit as a social listening tool for the last two years. Acne and blemishes are one of the top skin concerns searched there, and how could we make a product that purifies and detoxifies, but also nourishes, which is who we are?” Hilarczyk said.
The move also coincides with the brand’s broadening consumer base. “Over 50 percent of our customers were 50-plus,” Hilarczyk said. “What we’ve seen the last two years basically on how we’ve positioned and gone back to the core of who the brand is, we’ve seen the customer still heavy in Millennials, and they’re entering younger.”
Hilarczyk thinks of the brand through the lens of Fango, “which is what we’re known for,” she said. “It’s iconic, it’s 40 years old, we sell like one per minute.”
That would put the product’s run rate around $30 million annually, and current distribution spans Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Dillard’s, Macy’s, Ulta Beauty and Amazon. Hilarczyk said there are “big announcements and expansion” on the docket for 2026, but she’s been judicious about who to partner with.
In her mind, it’s about finding like-minded partners, which have ranged from those retailers to a recent New York Fashion Week partnership with Prabal Gurung.
“I’ve always wanted to work with other fashion designers to support them,” Hilarczyk said. “The last couple of years, beauty and fashion have intersected together and I think skin is an important part of what we see on the runway, especially with when we were growing up with ’90s fashion.”
“We are celebrating our customer,” Gurung said. “The woman — she’s not just about fashion. She’s about the skin, the beauty, all of that stuff. I always feel like women are already beautiful. I just have to meet them where they are, and that’s my job as a designer. I used to watch my mom get ready in front of a vanity in her skin care routine, all of that stuff, and how everything transformed when she was going out. I always understand that fashion, getting ready, clothes, skin care — it’s a very ceremonial process.”
That being said, Hilarczyk thinks the future of skin care is more intuitive than regimental. “We don’t design our brand to go ‘you must use 1-2-3, every single day,’” she said. “We allow it to be intuitive so you feel your best.”
