Anyone into makeup — following Instagram beauty influencers, or just watching a bunch
of YouTube tutorials knows that Rihanna’s makeup line, Fenty Beauty, is blowing up.
It dropped during New York Fashion Week in September of this year and since then the color-poppin'
highlighters, matchstixs, and lip gloss have created a buzz on social media.
But the most notable thing about the line is the range of foundation shades —
there are 40 to be exact.
And many of the deeper shades were sold out in stores and online within days of the launch.
Which is bananas because how often do you hear about darker shades being sold out?
For a long time, the beauty industry has neglected women of color as consumers.
But our bad gal RiRi's incredibly successful makeup line has challenged the notion that
the market for deeper shades isn't profitable for cosmetic companies.
It also raised an important question: Why haven't most companies had the same kind of inclusivity
or the success to go with it?
Tiffany Gill: Well, the interesting thing about Fenty
is that it’s not the very first time that a beauty line has had expansive shades.
That’s Tiffany Gill, Associate Professor of History and Black American studies at the University of Delaware.
Tiffany Gill: Before the Fenty Beauty line launched, Make Up For Ever, another cosmetic company that
caters a lot to professional makeup artists, launched a campaign that also had a lot of skin tone inclusivity.
Other mainstream brands like Covergirl, Revlon, Maybelline, and L’Oreal also attempted to
cater to the broader market of complexions.
But it’s quite easy to see where mainstream brands have fallen short.
I went to several drugstores and a major department store and I saw a clear trend — there were
50 shades of beige to choose from.
This is looks really pale. I'm not, I'm not that pale...I'm...
But, the darker shades were limited to a handful of options.
When I tried to match my own skin with the available shades of foundation, you can see
how these few products weren’t going to work for me.
Is it really that hard to get it right?
Tasha Brown, a makeup artist based in LA, who's worked with a number of Hollywood stars,
doesn’t seem to think so.
Tasha Brown: As a makeup artist, it’s the same technique I would use that for anyone from Karen Elson to Alek Wek.
I first look at the undertone of the skin, then I look at the actual shade range, and then
I pick the correct texture for their skin tone.
So, there is no extra difficulty in understanding deeper skin tones.
So it's easy to find a foundation match if you know your undertone -- which is your underlying
skin tone on a spectrum of cool to warm.
But finding deeper shades that actually offer the right undertones for women of color has
been incredibly hard.
Maybe product development is where it gets really tricky?
Al-Nisa Ward: Yeah...actually,
It’s not very difficultto make deeper shades.
What??
Depending on the base, all foundations have the same basic base.
So for example, if we’re talking about a standard foundation, which would be a water
and silicone base, it’s an emulsion where the water phase is surrounded by silicone.
That basic emulsion would be the same.
The only difference between a lighter shade and a darker shade is the ratio of pigments.
And all foundations contain the same four pigments.
It's titanium dioxide, iron oxide red, iron oxide yellow, and iron oxide black.
So you just play with the ratios of those pigments to get to a lighter color or darker color.
The trouble with finding the right shade isn’t limited to foundation.
Tasha Brown: Yes, it's not just foundation, you know!? It is blush.
It is lipstick.
Where it’s a beautiful color, but it’s a light wash.
And deeper skin tones tend to demand a little more pigment.
It's a problem that can be solved with an understanding of darker skin tones.
But overall, in 2014, only 18% of American Chemical Society members were people of color.
In 2015, Black, Hispanic and Asian, women made up 16.3% of workers in the personal care products industry.
Tasha Brown: As a consumer, you want to have options in comparison.
You want things to be easy.
I want to be able to walk into a store and see myself represented.
Over the past few years mainstream beauty companies have been making an effort to be more inclusive.
But why is it taking them so long to get it right?
Tiffany Gill: When it comes to beauty, they’re usually based on very narrow ideas of what
constitutes beautiful.
And even if there are a wider range of women who are demanding products, a wider range of consumers
who want to see themselves reflected and are willing to pay money to get these products.
Many brands are unwilling to cater to them in fears that it will damage their brand.
In fears that it will make their brand less glamorous, less beautiful if it’s attached
to black women, if it's attached to darker skin women.
The beauty industry has a long history of only catering to a very specific type of person.
In the late 1940s, makeup for black women was available, but beauty companies still
focused on skin lightening products for black women.
Tiffany Gill: We begin to see, really in the 1970s, an attempt to begin to show a wider range of
beauty when it comes to makeup products.
It’s when the cultural movement “Black is Beautiful” began to rise as a celebration
of blackness in the African American community.
Robert Williams, a leading figure in American psychology, wrote, “The Black-is-Beautiful
movement and the all-out effort to instill racial pride in black people have done much
to neutralize and offset much of the damaging effects of oppression from being black.”
The movement, was not only a response to colorism in the Black community, but also the prevalent
racism in wider American culture.
That movement brought a change in the beauty industry too — more products were being
created for the black community.
Tiffany Gill: And the wider range of products for black women came from a lot of black-owned companies themselves.
Companies like Fashion Fair cosmetics, which was developed by the Johnson publishing company, which
was the publishing company behind Ebony [magazine], for example.
Drugstore brands like Maybelline had Shades of You in the 90s, Black Opal had products
that catered to women of color starting in 1994, Iman began selling in discount retailers in
2004, and Covergirl had the Queen Collection in 2006.
Then you had luxury brands like NARS, MAC, Bobbi Brown, Black-Up and Make Up For Ever
offering even more shades of brown at higher prices.
But it hasn’t always been a smooth ride for all of these brands.
L’Oréal faced controversy when it was accused of whitewashing Beyonce in its 2008 campaign.
In 2016, MAC launched their “Vibe Tribe” collection which at worst is cultural appropriation
and at best is pretty culturally insensitive...
...yep.
While mainstream brands have missed the mark, independent beauty brands have successfully
filled the gaps.
Brands like koyVoca, Cocotique and The Lip Bar all offer extensive products for women of color.
The gap between mainstream and independent brands is also evident in the way they reach
their audience.
While major brands still turn to traditional advertising on TV and in magazines, a lot
of independent creators rely heavily on social media.
Tiffany GIll: Social media has changed the beauty industry in tremendous ways.
What is really interesting is that if you go on social media there are lots of
women some of whom are professionally trained makeup artists, some women who like make up
who have huge followings.
And they have followings of people who will listen to what they say.
And so it’s much more intimate than having, for example, just a celebrity at the front of your campaigns,
which is often what Covergirl, and L'Oréal and many of the big companies have done.
Brands can try to copy Rihanna’s marketing but there’s more to it than that.
Rihanna: “If I love it, I’m going to go all the way to the end about it.
And I dabbled in makeup before, but this is like my vision from the ground up.
From the textures to the foundation shades, to the names...
"Rihanna: I have a hundred percent involvement in this process."
Even if Rihanna’s makeup line doesn’t live up to the hype over time, there’s no
denying that Fenty is causing a much-needed stir in the beauty industry.