Like many WOC, I was beyond disappointed when I learned that BeautyBlender had launched it’s first foundation—32 shades to be exact—and less than half of them catered to women with dark skin. You’d think after Rihanna set the bar high with Fenty Beauty last year—offering 40 foundation shades for ALL skin tones—that brands wouldn’t still be making these kinds of massive mistakes. Nope, they still are. Fortunately, there are brands like Fenty Beauty and Beauty Bakerie that we can count on. In fact, when Beauty Bakerie decided to launch their first foundation, they thought of women of color first and the way they went about the collection was pretty revolutionary.
Not only did Beauty Bakerie make sure they had a shade for every single skin tone included in their foundation collection BUT they also made a point to put the deepest darkest shades first—something we have yet to see before. Not sure what I mean exactly? Okay, so whenever you’re shopping for foundation online you’ll notice that the shade offerings start from the lightest to the darkest, right? Beauty Bakerie reversed that.
It’s such a powerful message if you really think about it. The message that makeup brands have been sending WOC since forever is that we either don’t matter or we come second. By labeling their deepest shade #1 and their fairest #59, Beauty Bakerie not only conveyed the message to brown and black women, that no we don’t come second but they also just called out a very problematic issues in the makeup and beauty world.
Beauty Bakerie’s Founder and CEO, Cashmere Nicole is a black woman on a mission to make all her customers feel beautiful and empowered—regardless of skin color. Serving brown and black women is actually a priority for her and that’s really what makes all the difference.
“For black women in particular, we are reminded everywhere we go, on a daily basis, multiple times throughout the day, that we are second,” Beauty Bakery founder Cashmere Nicole told Teen Vogue. “You go into a store, and you are bending down to nearly the ground to get your shade, or you go to a beauty store’s website, and when you’re looking for your shade you’re scrolling to the bottom of a list. And it could be any brand, but it’s going to be like, here are the light shades, and here are the dark all the way down here.”
It’s so crazy how conditioned we’ve become to thinking that the order has to be from light to dark. It’s brands like Beauty Bakerie who are really making a difference when it comes to beauty and representation. Let what Beauty Bakerie did be a model to other brands on how we need to start rewiring the way we think about beauty and the importance of making all beauty inclusive.
