A Good Morning America item in mid-May made for a great morning for a Toronto-based health and beauty company.  

On May 13, ABC-TV’s morning show aired a story, “How Dirty is Your Make Up?” testing 25 cosmetic samples collected from staffers. The beauty product results weren’t pretty. Eleven came back dirty, revealing bacteria that can lead to pink eye and strep throat. The best way to keep your face and make up clean, germ and bacteria-free, Good Morning America advised, was using BeautySoClean™, an innovative Canadian sanitizing line.

“Our web site and ecommerce went off like a sky rocket,” reports BeautySoClean™ creator, Nancy Crossley. “People everywhere were ordering our cosmetic sanitizer mist, cosmetic sanitizer wipes, and conditioning brush cleanser.”

After the deluge, Crossley told her Canadian staff to brace themselves. Since its creation four years ago, BeautySoClean™ has been a runway success in the modeling industry and a staple of Oscar- and Emmy Award-winning makeup artists. But when her product received the Good Morning America seal of approval, Crossley knew that her trade secret was about to become a global makeup phenomenon.

BeautySoClean™ launched with The Bay and Murale stores and was quickly picked up by London Drugs, Pharmasave and Pharmacie Jean Coutu. An international rollout will happen this fall, made possible by press and industry buzz in the U.S. and Europe.

The Good Morning America item was the result of an extensive grass roots marketing campaign. Many start-up companies have struggled to stay afloat in today’s economy. BeautySoClean™ beat the odds, building a following through successful trade show exposure. Industry buzz in turn created a strong and rapidly expanding U.S. online consumer base.

Recently, BeautySoClean™’s grass roots campaign went international.

“For the last year I’ve been like George Clooney in Up in The Air, flying everywhere,” says Crossley, a makeup artist and product developer for 25 years. “And the interest is starting to pour in from retailers and distributors. Boots UK is soon testing our line. And Sephora, the French-based cosmetic company, with 650 stores in 12 countries, is about to try out our stuff. It’s incredible. In the past year we’ve had inquiries from 14 countries, including Finland, Italy, Greece, China, Kazakhstan, Singapore, Sweden and Turkey.”

A mother of two herself, Crossley compares starting a successful company – developing, creating, warehousing, and selling a product – to child-rearing. “I’ve told everyone in the company that I felt like we gave birth to a four-headed baby,” Crossley says. “After we heard about Boots UK and Sephora testing our line, I told the team. ‘You know what,? our baby just grew up and had twins!”

The issue of motherhood comes easily to Crossley when discussing clean and germ-free makeup. It’s a way of business that Nancy learned from her mother, Jean Crossley, a makeup artist who worked on Street Legal and The Mike Bullard Show.

For a quarter of a century now, Nancy Crossley has practiced what her mother preached, spreading the message of clean and sanitized make up. “When you think about it,” Crossley says, “make-up is the only thing you put on your body that you’ve never cleaned … Until BeautySoClean™.”

Now Nancy’s company is about to perform a clean sweep of the beauty product world.