After founding her first makeup empire, Poppy Industries, at age eighteen, Poppy King launched her successful Lipstick Queen brand in 2006, earning international praise. As a teen, Poppy King was frustrated that the nude and coral shades of lipstick on the market didn’t flatter her coloring. In 1991, with a loan of $40,000, she created the Poppy line of darker, more intense shades of lipstick. By 1995, the year she received the Young Australian of the Year Award, the company was bringing in annual profits of $6.5 million. However, after expanding too quickly into American markets, the company collapsed in 1998 and in 2002 Estee Lauder bought the brand, dissolved the company, and hired Poppy King as a marketer and trend forecaster. In 2006, after leaving Estee Lauder, King started a new company, Lipstick Queen, which specializes in intense and unusual colors. One of the line’s most popular products is Frog Prince, a lipstick that changes colors based on the pH of a person’s skin. In 2008 King wrote Lessons of a Lipstick Queen: Finding and Developing the Great Idea that Can Change Your Life. In 2018, Elle magazine listed her Frog Prince lipstick as one of the ten most iconic lipstick shades of all time.