When Sukiana Chancy posted “I entered my CEO Era this week” on Instagram on September 5, 2026, it felt less like a press release and more like someone marking a personal turning point. In many ways it was. After nearly four years at Fenty Beauty, Chancy had helped grow skin, hair, and fragrance into businesses as big as the makeup line that first put the brand on the map. Now she was stepping into her first role as chief executive, leading Topicals, the clinical skincare brand founded in 2020 by Olamide Olowe.
Chancy’s path to that job began in two very different corners of the beauty world, and together they shaped the executive she would become. She started at The Estée Lauder Companies and Elizabeth Arden, where she learned how large companies build products, manage profit and loss, and operate across countries. From there she moved to DevaCurl and Cay Skin, where she worked with smaller teams and much closer relationships with customers. At those companies she learned how to grow a brand’s reach without diluting the specific things, the ingredients, the community, the voice, that made people loyal to it in the first place.
That range of experience, from managing large corporate infrastructure to protecting a brand’s identity at a smaller scale, is what caught Fenty Beauty’s attention. In 2022 the company brought her in as Global General Manager. Fenty had built its name on forty shades of foundation, but it wanted to build skin, hair, and fragrance into businesses that could stand just as strong. Two years later Chancy was promoted to Vice President of Skin, Hair and Fragrance, a role in which she led product development and worked with Sephora across regions. She helped those categories grow from add-ons into businesses that could stand entirely on their own.
Topicals, as it happened, had reached a similar moment in its own story. Olowe started the brand on TikTok with formulas made for hyperpigmentation, eczema, and acne, speaking to customers in a way skincare had not quite done before. The approach quickly made Topicals one of Sephora’s fastest growing skincare brands with Gen Z. Along the way the company raised more than twenty two million dollars and brought in investors like Angel Reese and Rema. By 2026 it had proven itself thoroughly in the United States and was looking outward for what came next.
That outward turn is what set the stage for Chancy’s arrival. On September 2, 2026, Olowe announced she would step down as CEO to become Chair, with Chancy taking her place at the helm. Speaking to The Business of Beauty in early September, Olowe explained that she wanted a partner who had come up through marketing, built a global brand, and managed a profit and loss sheet much larger than Topicals had ever handled on its own.
The work ahead reflects exactly that ambition. Topicals is already in Nigeria through Beauty Hut, and the plan now is to go deeper across Africa while also opening in Sephora stores across the Middle East and Europe. That push will mean navigating new regulations and forging new retail partnerships. It will also mean figuring out how to bring an online-first brand into physical stores where shopping habits look nothing like the ones it grew up on.
In her welcome post, Chancy called Fenty her dream job and thanked the Topicals team, adding that she was excited to work alongside Olowe to build on what she described as a genius brand. The point she made, without quite saying it outright, was that Topicals does not need someone to simply keep the lights on. It needs someone who has already scaled inclusive beauty once before, and who is ready to do it again with clinical skincare, this time across far more of the world.
With Chancy now in charge, the next chapter for Topicals will likely look less like a viral launch and more like the steady, deliberate work of building a global company.
