1 week Ago By Heather Saul
This week I was lucky enough to be invited to host a session at The Beauty Beat event in London. It’s the only luxury beauty event in the UK dedicated to women of colour – a community woefully underserved by the beauty industry for decades. For many people reading this, it would be unfathomable to think that they wouldn’t be able to walk into their local high-street chemist or department store and pick up a foundation or powder that matched their skin tone.
It’s just a given that you would be able to find something. But for some of us with a darker hue, that scenario only existed in our wildest dreams until fairly recently. And don’t get me started on luxury brands.
They certainly didn’t care much about women of colour. As far as many within the beauty industry were concerned, we were not a community worth catering to , the assumption being that we didn’t have the money to spend on make-up and items that would enhance our natural beauty. They didn’t see us as beautiful and their teams were full of employees who didn’t look like us, who had no friends who looked like us, so had no idea how to market to us.
That disconnect served only to tell women of colour that we didn’t matter – that our money wasn’t good enough. It’s amazing how you end up just adjusting to whatever scraps you’re left as a woman of colour in order just to get by. I used bronzing powder from The Body Shop for years, as it was the only powder I could find – and afford – which even slightly nodded towards my own skin tone.
I remember standing in a branch of Anita Roddick’s chain trying anything that looked even half-way “brown” in an effort to find something that could cover the blemishes on my skin before a night out. I took to mixing foundation in the shop on the back of my hand to try to see if I could create something by myself. But it was often fruitless.
Read Next My favourite influencers had secret surgery and I feel betrayed Then I found MAC Cosmetics, and that’s what I used for years. It wasn’t necessarily the perfect shade, but it was better than what came before. Like many women of colour, I was assessed as being the shade number “NW45”.
But fast forward a couple of decades, and “You’re not NW45” is the slogan for a MAC Black History Month campaign this year, with the aim of highlighting the issue of shade-matching black women. I, like millions of other black women, had been inaccurately shade-matched for years by MAC, with NW45 being the default shade recommended by many make-up artists in stores. Regardless of whether it matched your skin tone or not.
This whole issue may seem frivolous or pointless if you have been catered to make-up wise your whole life. But you would only say that from a position of privilege. For the first 15 years of my career I would always carry around my own foundation, powder, eye-shadows and palettes to jobs and shoots.
I would see the look of horror that would pass over a make-up artist’s face when they saw me walk in and realised they would have to find something, anything, in their make-up bag that was dark enough to use on my face. Invariably whatever they used would not be my colour, so it became easier to just bring my own stuff. There are only so many times you go on TV looking severely anaemic before you have to admit defeat and start carrying a make-up bag around with you to save embarrassment on both sides.
I would love to say that the mismatched foundations, blushers and too-bright eye-shadow no longer happens to me, considering the high-profile nature of my job. I’d be lying. It does still happen, perhaps not with as much frequency.
But every now and then I look in the mirror having been done up by a make-up artist and have to fight back the tears when I realise how wrong they’ve got it. What has changed, however, is brands finally waking up to the fact that women of colour spend a lot on beauty and that they’ve missed a lot of sales the past few decades. One sector still playing catch-up is luxury beauty and it was a joy to see so many brands finally engaging with women of colour last weekend at Beauty Beat.
There’s a lot of making up to do though – women of colour have long memories for those who have wronged them. But we can also forgive, especially if you actually match our colour right. Charlene White is a presenter for ‘ITV News’ and ‘Loose Women’.
