This Clean Beauty Shop Is a Downtown Wellness Refuge

For Black History Month, we’re profiling Black-owned businesses in the neighborhood. Find the whole series here.
Tucked in the Oculus in Lower Manhattan is a jewel box of clean beauty and wellness. At Pretty Well Beauty, neat displays of natural and sustainably sourced products stand out among the rainbow tiles, warm wooden details and swirling chandelier adorning the space. What’s there is a testament to founder and CEO Jazmin Alvarez’s motto: “Beauty is an inside job.”
The space is a one-stop shop for products supporting wellness and health. According to Alvarez, it’s not enough to just have great skincare and makeup — though there’s a carefully selected collection of those items to choose from. Her take on beauty is a whole-body approach. Every item is safe for human health and the environment, whether it’s hair care, fragrances or an herbal supplement.
“I would never sell anything that I would not use personally, period,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez, who worked in fashion, started Pretty Well Beauty as an Instagram account. It wasn’t a business then, but it was a start — a place to share her thoughts on clean beauty and the brands she thought were getting it right. From there, in 2019, she launched Pretty Well Beauty as an e-commerce site. “I was a complete fish out of water,” Alvarez said. “I had to figure it out myself.”
Today, Pretty Well Beauty is an omnichannel business with its digital marketplace, app and brick-and-mortar shop — a former tea store that appeared in Alvarez’s life through a bit of kismet. In the summer of 2022, she began inquiring about commercial spaces, and in the fall of 2022 — two days after her birthday — Alvarez secured the spot in the Oculus. It was the only spot she was shown, and Pretty Well Beauty opened on Black Friday.
Years earlier, an experience where Alvarez felt uncomfortable and unwelcome as a person of color at another clean beauty store motivated her to create “a space that didn’t exist in the way that I wanted to see it in the world,” she said.
“That’s what planted the seed for me to want to do better,” Alvarez said. “To create a more welcoming and inclusive space, no matter where you come from, what walk of life or what budget.”
Alvarez curates the space based on ingredients; each product must be naturally derived. Manufacturers must also prioritize sustainability, which manifests in how they source, make and package their products. The store honors “the origin stories of clean beauty, which stem from BIPOC people,” Alvarez said. Seventy percent of the brands on the shelves are founded by an underrepresented minority group.
Before Alvarez stocks a product, she takes the time to speak to the people behind the brands, who she later spotlights in the store. She wants to get under the hood and understand what makes each product unique.
It’s not so different from how she interacts with customers. She doesn’t like the idea of “someone having to sift through 50 moisturizers to figure out what’s right for them.” One of the joys of the business is getting to know and guide those who come into the store, Alvarez said. The crowd ranges from devotees to natural products making a pilgrimage to the shop or tourists exploring the Oculus who have never heard of clean beauty before.
“I want people to come in here and feel like they are part of a community,” Alvarez said. “This is not just a transactional relationship that is taking place in this space.”
Tags: black history month 2025, feature