Rosh Kumarasinghe just became Milan Fashion Week’s first South Asian Makeup Director

Ten years after leaving Sri Lanka for Thailand, then Australia, Rosh Kumarasinghe spent this weekend backstage at Milan Fashion Week as Makeup Director.

Public schedules and coverage so far put her as the first South Asian artist to hold that title on the official calendar. She did the job as a sponsor too.

Beauty by Rosh, the vegan, cruelty-free Australian brand she founded in 2020, was the official makeup partner for two main-calendar shows: Marco Rambaldi on September 26 and Casa Preti on September 27. She built both teams herself, recruited artists by portfolio, and kept her products and cameras in the room.

That combination is rare. Milan’s in-person runway list sits around fifty shows a season, and beauty jobs usually rotate among a small set of veterans and global houses. An independent founder who moved to Australia at thirty, with a brand only six years old, does not often hold both the product credit and the director’s chair in one weekend.

Perth, brown skin, and a teaching habit

From Perth, Beauty by Rosh makes color and skincare in Australia for a wide range of skin tones, including brown skin that prestige lines still underserve.

Before the fashion-week contracts, she taught. Her Masterclass World Series has walked more than a thousand women through their own makeup routines in cities from London and Paris to Colombo and Malé.

Colombo Fashion Week was the home base. Beauty by Rosh spent several seasons as official makeup partner there before chasing the bigger calendars. Those ramps were where the team learned to lock a look and leave with a real credit.

London, Sydney, then Milan

February 2026 put the brand on a bigger stage. At London Fashion Week, Beauty by Rosh became the first South Asian beauty brand, and the first Australian makeup brand, reported to sponsor designers on the main schedule. Partners included Bora Aksu, Pippa Todorson, Aadnevik, and Dahlia Razzook. Rosh also directed makeup for Dahlia Razzook’s show.

Australian Fashion Week followed in May. The brand took official makeup partnerships with Gary Bigeni and Karla Špetić, and Rosh directed a ten-artist team for Bigeni at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. For a Sri Lankan founder based in Australia, that weekend was the local receipt after London.

Then came Milan. Bologna’s Marco Rambaldi has shown in the city for about twelve years, since winning the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana’s Next Generation competition in 2014. The label is known for crochet cut from antique doilies, a signature heart motif, and casts that refuse one body type.

Casa Preti is a genderless Palermo label founded in 2017 by Mattia Piazza, built on quiet, clerical tailoring. Pairing an inclusion-forward Italian house with a more austere Sicilian one gave Rosh two different beauty problems to solve in twenty-four hours.

Our read

Fashion week beauty still runs on habit. Houses rebook the same directors. Sponsors lean toward names shoppers already know from the prestige wall.

Rosh’s path cuts against that: teach first, prove the brand in Colombo, buy proper sponsorships in London, bring the work home to Sydney, then walk into Milan as both partner and director. The firsts rest on public coverage, not a closed industry census, and they still matter.

She has said she left Sri Lanka, started over in Australia at thirty, and still treats Milan as one of the hardest rooms in beauty to enter. Our take: the useful model for the next founder is building a product line that can underwrite the show, then showing up early enough to own the look.