Sugar & Mice

"Every teen girl has angst about beauty, whether she's really into makeup or she's a total tomboy," says Ann Fowler, co-founder of BeautyQ.com Inc., a fashion and beauty portal that targets teenage girls exclusively. Stressing the importance of "beauty head to toe, inside and out," BeautyQ offers content, interactive and personalized features as well as an e-shop selling more than 120 of the latest must-have products.

BeautyQ's research shows that teen girls spend up to 20 hours a week on the Internet, and they've even come up with their own "Net language," spawned by Instant Messaging on the Web.

Fowler, 32, and her business co-founders, Angelique Finan, 33, and Dina Mackney, 34, began the Reston, Virginia-based company last year. "We looked at the beauty space and decided there were a lot of beauty e-tailers out there with strategies we didn't like," Fowler says. "One of the points in our business plan was that teen girls don't want to wade through their mothers' Web site that talks about how to get rid of age spots."

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Teen girls can log on to BeautyQ and get tips on everything from trendy clothes and celebrity hairstyles to food and exercise. They can even obtain a beauty profile called "Profile Me," which asks girls to submit 13 pieces of information about themselves-hair color, eye color, height, skin tone and so on. The computer then sends back one of 4,300 different beauty profiles, full of hip tips and advice on achieving "the look."

With expert advice and user input, Fowler is looking forward to forming partnerships with offline companies that will keep BeautyQ stocked with those hair-thickening products girls want so badly.