Black Owned Makeup Brands: matching shades doesn’t seem like rocket science anymore.
Growing up black, we as women didn’t meet with the best case scenario when it came down to befitting make-up products.
Articles and books described our skin as “the hardest colouring to find makeup looks for,” department store assistants turned their snooty faces with “we are sorry ma’am, our foundation line doesn’t cross that far along” and women magazines and feminine commercials always seemed to show off just white variations in the spectrum. It was a fiasco. At least for us.
Then arrives the “we are sick of it and we are switching things up” era and Black Women bowl straight through the lane. Black owned makeup brands pop up, take over and bid adiós to zebra inspired pancake and foundation sob stories. It’s a strike!
Range of Black Owned Makeup Brands
No more enacts of the walking dead (with ashen faces on our melanin dripping bodies,) no more episodes of “mix the colours,” and certainly no more rampaging around town looking for the Bermuda triangle that was cosmetics and wanting to poke every lofty attendant with the tip of your exceptionally sharp umbrella.
No more, because our own wonder women rose to our distress call.
Today, a range of black owned beauty brands exist and proudly so:
- YourTrueShade
- Crayon Case
- Beauty Bakerie
- Juvia’s Place
- 127 East Cosmetics
- Mented Cosmetics
- Laws of Nature Cosmetics
- MDMflow
- GloGirl Cosmetics
- AJ Crimson Beauty
- Nagi Cosmetics
- The Lip Bar
- Lamik Beauty
- Fashion Fair
- Iman Cosmetics
- Flawless Faces
- Gold Label Cosmetics
- KA’OIR Cosmetics
- B.L.A.C. Minerals Cosmetics
- Magnolia Makeup
- Lipmatic
are namely a few front runners on the subject. From high end brands to affordable, they are all in and matching shades doesn’t seem like rocket science anymore.
Shady Ladies
With the arrival of cosmetics for the darker skin shades, approached the icing on the cake, aside the obvious of course, the black owned community was finally getting the coin and securing the bag.
It was the onset of overthrowing the white standards of beauty the entire world was made to abide by, through choice or none. It was making a statement that “we matter, our skin matters and our melanin has reason and power.”
It was a motion forcing the mainstream media to accept and include diversity in an altogether one dimensional beauty industry. That was an uprising letting young black girls witness the much required inclusion, representation and certainly, products that would actually be manufactured for us by us.
It was a movement making a dent in the numbers of skin bleaching trying to fit into unrealistic European beauty standards. Isn’t that a wonderful feather in the cap or should I say, plumage?
Makeup signifies enhancement of existing beauty and it goes without saying, it underlines a woman’s confidence, possibly the reason behind us women being addicted to beauty products because even the best of us has self proclaimed flaws we’d just want to hide before hitting the road.
Ah, the perks to womanhood! To come in terms with that it isn’t just light skinned women that are made possible to switch off their insecurities at will anymore is a titanic boost of confidence in itself. A confident black woman today is a takeover tomorrow.
Credits
- Photographer: Phil Halfmann
- Creative Director: Sophia Lenore
- Lead Hair & Makeup: Sophia Lenore
- Hair & Makeup: Joanne Charles & Athaliyah Yisrael & Veronica Lopez
- Models: Sophia Lenore, Ayana Lewis, Ann-Neika JeanCharles, Gaelle Augustin, Kimonie Morrison, Hope Denbow
- Photography Assistant: Malcolm Mayo
- Written by Zoomaburst
