At skin-care company 4AM, Co-Founders (and college best friends!) Jade Beguelin and Sabrina Sade work hard to play hard. Although the Georgetown University alumnae’s post-grad lives took them in very different directions — Beguelin worked in finance, while Sade went to medical school — they both struggled to keep up with elaborate, multi-step skin-care routines. The green juice-drinking, Alo-wearing, Pilates princess aesthetic often accompanying these aspirational skin-care regimens simply didn’t fit with their demanding schedules (or late nights out), so the duo built a beauty brand that celebrates, rather than constricts, busy lives.
“If you want to go out, if you want to take a tequila shot at 4 a.m., who are we as a skin-care brand to shame you for that?” Sade, now a physician and post-doctoral dermatology researcher, tells Fashionista. “We are actually going to do that with you and celebrate that with you.”
Beguelin and Sade launched 4AM in 2021 with two “all-in-one” serums: Rise Serum ($69) and Rest Serum ($69). Think of each product as a “multivitamin for your skin,” the brand’s marketing reads. Its Rise Serum focuses on skin barrier support via cotton stem cells (to protect against pollution), rosemary extract (to reduce inflammation) and aquaxyl (to hydrate at the cellular level). For improved skin elasticity, its Rest Serum utilizes garden sprout extract, niacinamide and ergothioneine (an amino acid that interrupts the aging process, according to the brand).
Inspired by circadian rhythm research, both serums feature lespedeza capitata, which emulates “skin cells’ ability to resynchronize and regulate rhythm-dependent biological functions such as skin hydration, detoxification and essential repair pathways,” per 4AM. Multi-functional products often get a bad rap in the beauty industry (we’re looking at you, 3-in-1 shampoos), but 4AM aims to shift this narrative.
“The thesis was really, ‘how can we make people’s lives easier through skin care? How can we make the all-in-one thing or the quick thing or what is now ‘shameful’ in the industry actually something that’s better and aspirational?'” Sade explains.
The New York City-based skin-care brand followed up its serum duo launch with reusable Overtime Undereye Masks ($16) donning its slogan, “late nights, early mornings.” But it was in 2025, when 4AM launched Clean Sheets ($23) — its super-soaked cleansing wipes — that the skin-care brand was catapulted into TikTok virality.
Just don’t call Clean Sheets “makeup wipes”: The co-founders are “trying to create a new category” known as “skin-care wipes,” since the individually wrapped sheets contain serum ingredients like rose water, centella asiatica, glycerin and vitamin B5. They’re also packed with four times the liquid of a standard makeup wipe to deliver a gentle cleanse with minimal tugging, per the brand.
“When we developed [Clean Sheets], we didn’t look at other wipes on the market as any sort of benchmark,” Beguelin says. “We looked at: What are our favorite micellar waters? What are our favorite serums? How can we put that into a wipe format?”
Photo: Courtesy of 4AM
Since going viral on TikTok shortly after launching, Clean Sheets has sold out four times, says Beguelin. But while TikTok virality can send beauty brands soaring into the zeitgeist, it can also be a double-edged sword for a business: Sold-out inventories can signal a smash hit, but prolonged restocks can lead to a brand missing out on potential consumers. While trying to restock before Black Friday, Beguelin recalls running the brand’s bank account down to $400 to ensure there was enough product to meet consumer demand.
“After the third time that we ended up selling out and then increasing volumes of Clean Sheets, that’s really when we realized that wipes, for us, can be the platform that we built the entire narrative of the brand around,” Sade says.
Now, 4AM’s Clean Sheets order runs are 40x the size of the product’s initial one. Thanks to this surge in its manufacturing negotiating power and its bulk ingredient orders, 4AM could afford to produce more Clean Sheets for a reduced cost. Within the current economic landscape of brands passing down price hikes to consumers, 4AM is one of the few beauty brands lowering its prices. In July, the company announced that it was increasing its Clean Sheets box size from 25 sheets per box to 30 sheets per box, while simultaneously decreasing the price from $29 to $23. Broken down further, this places the price per sheet at $0.77, down from $1.16.
“The one thing that we really wanted to convey is [that] just because it’s expensive does not mean that it’s premium,” Sade says. “We are trying to get that consumer the best price possible so people can actually use it every day and have a premium product that’s not gated by a $50-plus price point.”
Photo: Courtesy of 4AM
While gradually scaling its 5-year-old business, 4AM has also been expanding its retail footprint into major players like Revolve, Bloomingdale’s, C.O. Bigelow and, most recently, Target. The skin-care brand’s exclusive mini five-pack of Clean Sheets is available in more than 1,700 Target stores nationwide, and it is currently scaling up to launch its full-size boxes in these doors. In keeping with the brand’s ethos of embracing simpler solutions, 4AM’s main reason for launching into Target was consumer accessibility. According to the big-box retailer, 75% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Target store, making it an accessible hub for product discovery.
“We wanted to give the consumer that better experience without it feeling hard for them,” Sade says. “That is the core of the brand, that we’re giving you back your time. So it almost felt like Target was the perfect place because that is the place that you go [to] do your quick haul or run.”
Although much of 4AM’s branding is inspired by New York City’s nightlife, it attracts a wide-ranging audience, from lawyers to Alaskan fisherwomen. Above all else, 4AM wants its audience to treat their lives (and their skin-care routines) like “it’s a party.” To honor the LGBTQ+ community’s influence on club culture, a portion of every 4AM order is donated to New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center.
As 4AM continues to expand its nationwide distribution, it’s going all-in on its mission to reframe the beauty wipes space as a celebratory, yet still convenient, experience.
“I think so many people fall into this trap of wanting to launch a million different products,” Beguelin says. “That is not our focus. We have plenty of room to grow in our category, and we want to really own that category.”
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