Anastasia Soare: Escaping Communism for the American Dream

Long before she became one of the most influential figures in the beauty industry, Anastasia Soare was a young girl in Constanța, a port city on the Black Sea in communist Romania. Her father was a ship captain, and her mother was a tailor. The family lived modestly under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime, without reliable heat or electricity. Survival, not success, was the daily goal.

But Anastasia found escape through art. From a young age, she sketched and sculpted, finding order and inspiration in symmetry and aesthetics. Her parents encouraged her creativity, and she later studied art and architecture — an education that would unknowingly set the stage for a revolution in beauty.

When her husband defected to the United States in 1986, Anastasia was left behind with their young daughter. Three years later, in 1989, she and her daughter immigrated to Los Angeles, just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She didn’t speak English, had no financial safety net, and found herself in a foreign country with nothing but a work ethic, an eye for beauty, and a relentless belief in her own vision.