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Vanessa Nadal has always sought out being challenged and finding opportunities that played to her strengths. It’s guided the scientist-turned-lawyer throughout her career.
“I was never someone who said, ‘I’m so passionate about this one thing and that’s all I care about,’” explains Nadal, who is the global marketing counsel at the Estée Lauder Companies. “I recognized that about myself early on.”
Nadal has built an impressive career alongside her husband, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Armed with a chemical engineering degree from MIT and a law degree from Fordham University, she’s focused on creating a safer, more transparent beauty industry both in her role at Estée Lauder and co-teaching the first-ever law school course on US cosmetics regulation.
From Science to Law
When Nadal applied and was accepted to MIT, she thought she was going to be a doctor. Specifically, she’d become a neurosurgeon. But instead, after evaluating the time it would take to achieve that career path (twelve years), she opted for chemical engineering.
Her courses focused on genetics, tissue engineering—always something with the human body. Many who study chemical engineering go into gas and oil, but that wasn’t interesting to Nadal. She went to Johnson & Johnson and started with bench lab work.
“But I felt a little lonely, so I moved to a group where I also tested clinical efficacy of cosmetics on actual users. For example, does this antiaging moisturizer actually reduce wrinkles?”
Within a few years, Nadal began contemplating whether to pursue a graduate degree. If she pursued a PhD, she would stay in a laboratory and she wasn’t sure that’s what she ultimately wanted.
Nadal missed writing. She initially thought she would go to college for reading and writing, not science. “I am an avid reader and my high school was very heavy in writing, and so I missed that part of who I am,” she explains. “So I started looking and considered science journalism. And then I stumbled upon law by having to do a patent map for an idea we had.”
She dove headfirst into her next challenge: law school, describing it as “the most rash decision I made.” Nadal applied within three months of deciding and was accepted to Fordham Law School.
The whole time she was at law school, Nadal assumed she would go into patent law. She chose a firm, Jones Day, that had a strong patent group—and also allowed for trying different practices.
Nadal didn’t love patent law. She gravitated instead toward international litigation and arbitration. “What I liked was this persuasive side,” she explains. “Law brought together the two sides of me: I am very logical, but also like to be a little argumentative, to try to poke holes in assumptions [like a scientist] to find out what’s really happening. Can I persuade someone to my way of thinking, or will they persuade me?”
But after nearly six years at Jones Day, Nadal was missing science.
“I didn’t go into law to leave science,” she says. “I went into law to find another avenue into science.”
Leadership Advice from Vanessa Nadal
Get the best idea in the room.
“That’s the one thing that gains you respect in any room, in any job. Nobody knows everything, and everybody has lots of different perspectives. Always be open to different kinds of expertise and perspectives.”
Don’t fall victim to imposter syndrome.
“The fact that it has a name means that everybody’s feeling it. If I am excited and scared about something, it’s probably worth doing. I think back on all the reasons I decided to be in this moment and forge through.”
Enter Susan Scafidi.
The Best of Both Worlds
Nadal was getting ready to leave Jones Day. Its healthcare law group was not centered in New York, so she knew she’d have to start looking for something else. And she was headed to London with Lin-Manuel for his next project.
Scafidi, founder of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham School of Law, reached out looking for a cosmetic chemist to be part of a panel on beauty in the law.
“At first, I thought, ‘I haven’t done that work in nine years. I can’t call myself a chemical engineer anymore,’” Nadal remembers. “But I did the math: on a panel, I’d speak alone for five minutes. I could easily fill that with three years of my work!”
She accepted the opportunity, and that opened the doors to welcome her into the intersection of law and science that she had been looking for. Nadal began working with Scafidi and wrote a treatise about cosmetics. The treatise is still pending publication, but it turned into the first-ever law course on US cosmetics regulations that Nadal codeveloped with Claire Bing, founder and CEO of Confiance Cosmetic Group.
When Nadal first started working on the course, she didn’t realize there was no other class like it. Someone who wrote one of the most-used FDA books told her he had never heard of anyone doing a class just on cosmetics, and that tipped her off that she was working on something unique.
Nadal hit it off with Bing immediately, and the pair bring two perspectives to the class: Nadal brings a legal and academic lens and Bing brings a business lens. “Our goal is, ‘Take this course, and you’ll be able to take your friend who’s making kitchen cosmetics and help them navigate becoming a national brand.’”
Seven years later, Nadal and Bing are still teaching the course at Fordham.
Then, as Nadal’s children grew a little bit older, she began looking for positions that were more traditional and stable. In 2022, she joined the Estée Lauder Companies.
“At Estée Lauder, I get to use both of my degrees,” she explains. “I work with scientists and talk to them about what the ingredients are doing. I get to read the lab reports and determine whether the claims that the markets want to make are supported by the evidence that we have. It’s a fun combination of all the work I’ve done in my life.”
What Is Success?
How Nadal defines success has changed. In the beginning, success was the pursuit of being the best. It was going to rigorous schools and being an A student. It was climbing the career ladder in pursuit of the next title. It was financial stability.
“Then I had kids, and my husband began to have incredible success in his career,” she says. “It didn’t change my perspective, but it shifted the factors. When financial stability was not as much of a question anymore, what am I free to dream of next?”
She shares how she took a step back to let Lin-Manuel excel and try new things, but it was tough. There wasn’t a premade path that easily identified what success looked like anymore.
Now, success is a mix of where Nadal feels challenged and where she feels like she’s constantly learning. She compares this to her favorite book, Moby Dick.
“Herman Melville just tries every way possible to understand the whale. The protagonist references the Bible and poetry and applies contemporary science (phrenology). He fights it and plunders its oil. He sails through a nursery and walks through the bones. In the end, the whale gets away,” she explains. “So this idea of perspective and knowledge and learning is really central. Knowledge is a journey, the journey. For me, success is feeling intellectually stimulated and emotionally full.”
