What's happening in America right now is just...crazy. SomehowAmerica is standing in the exactly same place in did in the 40's, 50's, 60's. I'm not going to talk about it all. We would be here all day. Just the stuff I see happening in the beauty community. Because it's spilling over.
The beauty industry has a habit of excluding women of color. Which is why brands like Fashion Fair and,Flori Roberts were born. There was a time when there were literally NO colors for brown skin. I think towards the nineties a couple came out that had WOC shades. Over the years, some brands have the obligatory grey/pink under toned foundations that are completely wrong for dark skin-I'm talking about Covergirl and Maybelline. A lot of brands didn't/don't even try (Almay. Physicians Formula, Neutrogena.It Cosmetics just to name a few).
Covergirl redeemed themselves with the Queen collection. They have a really nice range of foundation for brown skin, it's just hard to find..L'oreal kind of tries-or at least they did with the HIP line-now discontinued and their True Match foundation has gotten much better the past 5 years but has a way to go in my opinion. Revlon's color range is mostly horrendous, the only one they kind of gave effort with was the Color Stay line. And you can barely find the deep shades and when I did-no match! Even now most of their newer lines stop at medium beige.
And then you have higher end brands like Benefit (they stop at Brown paper bag brown and it matches literally no one!), Too Faced and Tarte mostly pretend brown/dark people don't exist. Chanel doesn't have any shades that would match a woman of color. Literally 50 shades of beige and white. Then again there are some that have an OK range like Makeup Forever, they have a few darker shades but in comparison to the lighter shades, it could be better. Also the undertones tend to be off for really deep skin. MAC is alright. I like that they advertise all races, all ages, all sexes. But their undertones can be off, and the MAC salespeople love to match all WOC to the same old NW45, no matter what our skin tone. EVERYBODY IS NOT NW 45!
NARS has a great shade range. There are at least five shades if not more that are deeper than my skin tone. And there in a foundation line at Lancome with a decent range. Estes Lauder Double Wear seems to have a a decent range too.
So there has been some progress. But there's still a lot more to go.
And I think Fenty Beauty is the one that will change a lot of companies. I know some people are mad at Rihanna. I have heard the most ridiculous, unfounded criticisms. A well known youtuber/ "CEO"- not even a makeup artist, tried to shade her for being a celebrity(and not a makeup wearer..pfft) and coming out with a line, BUT this same person will praise Kat Von D and Marc Jacobs products-neither of whom are makeup artists either-also. I even saw a comparison going around where they tried to say the KKW contour stick and the Rihanna ones were similar. And they aren't, the "CEO" just couldn't be bothered looking at the ingredients and giving an actual comparison. (The CEO is Marlena of Makeup Geek in case you are wondering-I'm not a fan of her at all). These illogical tweets were later deleted after Twitter started coming for her.
Anyway, Rihanna did something that hasn't been done in awhile. She launched 40 shades of foundation. From the palest of pale shades, to the deep dark. And she plans on launching more. So what did brown girls do? They ran out and supported. When I was in the store I saw a girl getting her Fenty Beauty stuff- and she really didn't know much about makeup. She just knew she was there to support.
I was all ready to take home my brand new Fenty foundation-but of course my shade was sold out and as I'm hearing, it's not set to restock for quite awhile. The contour sticks and the highlighters look interesting, but I'm not big on contouring or highlighting. And I really like the brushes. They are super cute. I might try the primer eventually. But I have my heart set on trying the foundation. I did get to test it on my hand and from what I saw I really liked it. The foundation is really the star of the show- yes I know people are saying it's the highlightter Trophy Wife. And I loved the way it looked on Rihanna at her launch party but I'm not a fan of yellow/green golds on my skin tone.
What's really crazy is now other brands seem to be scrambling to market to brown girls. They want our money too now, now that they see the buying power that has always been there.
Sad that it took someone who was not even a makeup artist to do it.
I didn't mean to talk about Fenty Beauty first. I kind of wanted to talk about the craziness that has been happening in the beauty community lately. Everyone knows about the beauty influencer that had videos show up of him using slurs against many different ethnicities, and saying he would throw acid on a black woman to lighten her skin tone. Reprehensible. It really is. But this same influencer is in Sephora, sitting on Benefit's packaging (never buying anything from this brand-regret a mascara I purchased years ago from them!). Then Tarte was in hot water recently for sharing a meme with a racist term against Asian people. And lastly another seemingly innoncent beauty influencer caught letting the n word fly out of her mouth. Looked mighty comfortable using it. But blamed it on the alcohol.
Am I trippin'? Have these things been happening more often in the beauty community...or...IDK. What are your thoughts?
I would love the hear them!
No comments:
Post a Comment