Deepica Mutyala built a beauty brand from virality and now she wants more

The year is 2015. A lipstick-as-colour-corrector video pushed Deepica Mutyala’s face onto millions of screens. Back then, YouTube beauty tutorials were still rough around the edges, and the idea of a brown-skinned woman teaching the world to colour correct with a red lipstick was unheard of. Today, there are entire shelves, campaigns and hashtags shaped by that moment.

Mutyala was 25, working full-time in product development, not chasing internet fame. But her accidental virality–at a time when likes still felt like surprises–lung her into a new orbit. News stories followed. Her Instagram exploded and her beauty brand, Live Tinted, was born from a viral moment and built for all skin tones. So did rounds of funding, features on the founder and the usual headlines about breaking glass ceilings. She became a case study in representation. The ‘girlboss’ arc played out in real time.

What followed wasn’t just a wave of support, but also scrutiny. “There was this unspoken pressure to be everything at once. Relatable and aspirational.

Loud and palatable. Brown, but brand-safe,” she says. The early years weren’t just about building a business; they were about decoding how much of herself to make legible to the world.

Mutyala is 36 now. The decade since has brought scale, visibility, pressure and an internal shift she’s still in the thick of. She’s less interested in hustling toward the next milestone and more focused on slowing down enough to ask: What do I actually want now? That question shows up in her personal life too.

“No one knows who I’ve dated. I’ve never posted that,” she says, when talking about boundaries. The algorithm may have helped build the brand, but not every part of her life is open to the public.

The tension between visibility and privacy shows up in smaller ways too. “My audience loves content about my family, and I love sharing it. But when I go home, I just want to eat dosas on the ​​couch and watch a Hindi movie without documenting it,” she says.

She isn’t stepping back or burning out. But the version of ambition that powered her 20s doesn’t feel quite right anymore. “I want the kid and the company. I used to believe you couldn’t have both. But that’s changed.”