Lily (0:27)

And welcome to episode one of the Bareface podcast, the podcast revealing the beauty industry's untold stories. I am Lily, I am your host, and I am a digital marketer and data science student that is obsessed with all things beauty, but specifically where it intersects with things like Internet culture, design, business, feminism, and all of the kind of intricacies of the space that aren't platformed all that often. I care a lot about why we buy as opposed to what we buy. And Bareface is a research and insights company that specializes in beauty. We help beauty brands source, interpret and utilize data to understand the ever changing beauty customer. Over on TikTok, I share short form snapshots of some of the biggest stories in beauty in all of those different areas that I've just outlined. But often when I'm doing that, I've realized that these topics are actually really quite large and rich. And there is so much that I want to say and TikTok doesn't really allow for that type of conversation. And as I'm sure we're all aware, TikTok is so guilty of neglecting any nuances or giving any space to kind of build out a full, well rounded, not argument, that's not the right word, but concept, I guess. And instead you kind of have to go in with this snap bite and often it's really reductive. So, as I said, this podcast is aiming to be the podcast that reveals beauty industries untold stories. And today I thought that we'd start with the possibly the most untold story of them all, which is the black beauty problem. What is the black beauty problem? The black beauty problem is the beauty industry's neglect of black consumers, specific needs manifesting in limited product options, underrepresentation and disproportionate economic opportunities. We exist in this really weird space at the moment where it kind of takes a creator of color to be racially discriminated against and speak out about that before it's actually brought to social media or before it's platformed or before we see this really broad conversation around it. And that kind of has to change. Like it's 2024. There has been so much research, particularly in the last five years, that's really quantified and outlined this issue that I really hope to bring light to today. But we've still got like macro aggressions from the youth for your launch earlier this year. For those that don't know, Euthoria, a small indie brand, launched a foundation that included only black pigment. Only black pigment. We've also got microaggressions like shade names of foundations or shade names of any products that are targeted at brown and black girls. And it just blows my mind that it's 2024 and this is the industry that we're looking at and we're in many ways accepting. So today we're going to kind of unpack that quickly. Before I get stuck into it, I did want to mention that I've made quite a few videos over on TikTok about this. And while the majority of people are happy about that, there's usually a few people that are quite outraged that by me, a white woman, I feel like I can talk about this. And I just want to speak to that before I start because I understand that this is not my lived reality, this discrimination is not my life and my voice will never be as important as a woman of colors when it comes to the black beauty problem. But I firmly, firmly believe that fixing this issue should not rely on their labor fixing this. They are the victims of a system that has been built off of white supremacy. And by enforcing that, they're the only people to speak about it. It kind of perpetuates that same problem. But anyway, let's define what we mean by black beauty. Lolly King wrote this brilliant article for Harper's Bazaar back in October 2021 where she brilliantly articulated how reductive the term black beauty is. King wrote, most of the black owned beauty founders I spoke to launched their brands from a need to make space. Founder of Uoma Beauty, Sharon Tudor questioned, how do I create a space that is safe for everyone? How do I change this monolithic view of beauty and make beauty varied? King went on, she's right. The idea of monolithic beauty ideal is far from realistic. In fact, even the term black beauty is reductive, whereas it actually encompasses a broad spectrum of skin tones, hairstyles and textures. I thought this just really brilliantly put how black beauty is kind of placed under these shackles of how we allow for it to be defined. And it's not even defined, it's just this catch all term for anything that doesn't conform to this Eurocentric beauty ideal. And we don't allow for the same space as skin types or undertones or hair textures when it comes to black women. It's just black beauty. Here in Australia, or specifically for me today, Ghana country, the colonization of beauty has built an incredibly exclusive industry where again, you must conform to the white beauty ideal. Or as first nations beauty creator Rosie Kalina told Vogue, that as a minority creative and even to a greater extent as a First nations creative, Rosie has not found social media without its pitfalls. Like many others she labels under the dual weight of being asked to wants to be more and wants to be less of who she is, of others asking for representation of aboriginality that they can understand instead of giving creators the space to be their own selves at once. Rosie was asked to express her culture but punished for it unless it neatly fit into a box accepted by mainstream white culture. People would comment under her posts policing her expression of aboriginality, saying this isn't real aboriginal art or this isn't traditional, as if they get to determine what she what that means, she says. The audacity. I almost began to internalize the colonial gaze and expectation that I have to before my culture ought to be accepted. And it's the same idea really where we're now in 2024, that we understand that there's people are ethnically diverse and people have different backgrounds, but we only allow them to express it in a way in which, as Rosie puts it, the colonial gaze allows rather than that idea of monolithic beauty of true acceptance. Instead, we're at a place where diversity is allowed, but only in very specific contexts. And often when we think about the black beauty problem, we think of the African beauty problem, which is very much alive and well, but we really need to recognize that this is an intersexual issue. The extent of this issue is so profound it extends to Latin American, East Asian, Middle Eastern, Polynesian, Southeast Asian and First Nations Australian, among many, many more. Majority of the topics and research and references I do refer to in this episode are centered around the African American experience, but I do need to footnote that it doesn't end there. Unfortunately, there's excruciating little research done here in Australia around the beauty industry in general, but definitely nothing around racial diversity of the country's biggest retailers, which is actually something that I barefaced and working on by web scraping all the products available. I'll be analyzing shade range availability along with other areas like category growth to kind of give Aussie beauty businesses a better understanding of our localized economy. You'll hear in today's episode the way that the beauty industry has been so Americanized. So if that piece of research is something you'd be interested in getting your hands on, be sure to sign up to newsletter in the show notes. But let's take a look at the studies and numbers that we do have to really quantify and put into perspective the size of this issue. McKinsey and co conducted two surveys and a focus group about the consumer experience in the beauty sector. They analyzed retail store placement among black and non black populations and examined the placement of black beauty products within stores. They also conducted dozens of interviews with insiders at beauty companies to hear about their experiences. Further, they collaborated with several prominent black beauty industry executives to get their input as they developed their research. Research so let's look at five of the things they found about a black beauty consumer shopping experience in the U.S. these findings came from McKinsey & Co. Which is a company that has been criticized for its conservatism for years. So it's likely that all of these figures are a baseline. And they're a baseline again because they're us specifically like quadruple this to understand the magnitude of this problem anyway.1. Black consumers are offered a drastically smaller amount of product options. 47% of our survey respondents said that they typically buy beauty products at a mass market retailer or a grocery store. Yet only 13% said it's easy to find beauty products that meet their needs there. 2. Black consumers are three times more likely to be dissatisfied than non black consumers like me as a white woman. Every now and then I'll buy a product that doesn't work for my sensitive skin or I don't like the colour. But if that happened three times as often as it does suddenly, I'm not even going to bother wasting my money. Beauty isn't cheap at all, let alone luxury. And all of these ways that we use beauty as a form of escapism or self expression or all of its really powerful attributes. If I just want something as simple as a moisturiser, the least I want it to be is usable. 3. Black consumers show an affinity and preference for black beauty brands and are 2.2 times as likely to conclude that products from those brands will work for them. Understandable, right? I have acne prone skin. I buy skincare from a qualified dermatologist that understands my skin. As a black woman, I would understand that you would want the same. You would want someone that understands your hair type to be formulating your shampoo or conditioner. However, only 4 to 7% of beauty brands carried by specialty beauty stores, drugstores, grocery stores and department stores are black brands. To make this point even Worse, of the 45 black founded beauty brands, McKinsey & Co identified that there were nine that were not black owned. Those nine generated 82% of the total annual revenue of those 48 brands, meaning that the 36 black founded and black owned brands made up only 18% of that revenue.4. Black consumers have a drastic lack of product availability in stores. On average, Black consumers travel 3.36 miles more to a specialty beauty store, about 21% further than white consumers. So at this point, if I was a black consumer, I would be traveling way further to get somewhere that is only going to have 4 to 7% of brands that are made by someone who actually gets what I need. And then if I do decide to buy something, I'm going to be three times as likely to not even work on me. Like, huh.5. Black consumers often have a sour in store shopping experience because sales associates lack knowledge about black beauty products. 73% of respondents said products for black customers are often out of stock alongside a lack of sale associate knowledge and poorly placed product. What I really hope this is doing is layering and stacking these issues often what we do. And I'm very, very much guilty of this on platforms like TikTok that are more digestible or even in YouTube in some forms where you kind of, you want to showcase and highlight something that's really problematic, but by doing that you kind of reducing all of the nuances and, and again the stacking of the problems like it's, it's not just that a sales associate doesn't know your skin type, which is just also really insane. If you think about it like that's a huge part of the experience, particularly for people. If you think about like older generations that don't have that education element that's coming from social media. They're going into a shop only with their own ability to articulate what they want and need. It doesn't actually translate to, to a product. Sales assistants are a huge part of the beauty industry. And put it this way, you would never have a beauty retailer in 2024 that would be like, oh, let's just half our costs and wages by getting store associates because they're huge sales drivers. Right. But that's essentially what black women are experiencing. It's like they're walking into a store and there's no one there because they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to their, their concerns and their needs. What I also hope that these points outline is how when we talk about the exclusion of black women from beauty, we often only look at it through that marketing and advertising lens. Like pushing brands to be exclusive of all skin colors is productive. Yes, but it ignores the very legitimate differences and nuances in what black women need from their beauty products with different skin tones, like a deeper focus pigmentation or completely different hair patterns. This goes so much further than just casting the right models. These women need to be thought about at every stage of the product journey. Like it goes further back than just when you've got the product and, and it's coming to the marketing of the product. These women need to be thought about at the very beginning of the product development journey because now we've just got this industry. It doesn't do that. This is so comparable to greenwashing that we've seen a lot of brands do in recent years whereby they know that consumers are sustainably conscious at least. And there's been a lot of studies that have supported that, then that's a part of the their purchasing decision. So we had a lot of brands that were manipulating statistics to make it look like they were doing much better than they were. We really started to crack down on that because we saw how problematic it was. But this is the same thing. It's so performative and so problematic because it's not solving the issue. It's such a band aid fix. And then we have these brands that get praised for having a diverse range of models. But when it comes to something like beauty, which is really defined by the efficacy of a product, because at this point we all understand all of the witchcraft and wizardry that goes into a campaign. You can make anything look good on anyone in the right lighting, but if the people that you've advertised the product for buy it themselves and go home and it doesn't work, hello scam. Now let's have a look at the history. So Beauty be has been around for several millennia, so I'm not even going to try and attempt to give you a snapshot of the history of black beauty. Someone that did do a really good job of that was episode one of the Black Beauty Effect on Netflix. They do a really great kind of whistle stop tour of the foundation of inclusion for black women in beauty in the US And I highly recommend you giving it a watch. It's very entertaining. Coming to think of it, it would also be great as a podcast if you just want to plug in and tap, tap away and do some emails or something. But anyway, they do a great job of it. I'm not going to attempt to, but what I do want to talk walk you through is the last 35ish years from like a pop culture perspective to give you an understanding of the recency of the black of black beauty from an availability point of view. Because I think Sometimes when you go really deep into the history, you can see all of people that were really impactful in creating the product. But creating the product is only like the very, very first domino. So we're going to start in the 90s. In 94, after forging her way as one of the first black models, Iman launched a beauty line which was specifically catered to women of color. And there was only four foundations. It wasn't like how we know fenty beauty to be today, where it's like 40 shanes and it was for everybody and da da da da da. It was specifically for black women, and that was monumental. But what made it even way more significant was where it was available. So it launched in department stores such as jcpenney and Walgreens, which I hope I'm getting this right to my understanding, is like. It is like Target here in Australia, although America has target too. So maybe it's like a kmart. Before Roman cosmetics, black women often had to shop at beauty supply stores which were not always conveniently located and often had a limited selection of products. Again, to the availability point. I know I said it, but a product being created for you is only good if you're able to get your hands on it. The landscape for advertising and actually coming to know of that product and then being able to purchase that product was unbelievably difficult. And amand cosmetics really, really changed that up. I then also kind of want to highlight Tyra Banks breakthrough. Of course, there were much bigger celebrities at the time like Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, and Missy Elliott through hip hop and my R and b. But what Tyra was really significant was being the 90s, there was this tabloid culture, and so it wasn't as closely linked to high fashion as iman. Tyra became really mainstream, and a lot of the momentum of the black beauty movement has come from the democratization of influence. It was that pop culture element and later became the Internet culture element that really started to give the black beauty movement pace. And I truly think that tabloid culture was quite foundational in that we then had Mac cosmetics, and Mac did inclusivity well before it was trendy. From its inception in 84, Mac was one of the first major beauty brands to cater to a wide range of skin tones, including shades for women of color. Mac was ahead of its time in recognizing the influence of black culture on beauty and fashion. In the 1990s, the brand collaborated with black celebrities like Mary Joe Blige and Lil Kim for their Viva glow glam campaign and it's crazy that we had a brand like Mac that was doing inclusivity right so long ago. Coming back to that point about from marketing all the way back to product development, they had that whole spectrum of inclusion and they did it properly. So it's kind of frustrating to see that if they could get it right in the 80s or really the 90s, in 2024, we still don't have brands that can do it. I understand that they are big and we had a lot of the influence of makeup pre the 2000s being controlled by those big beauty conglomerates, because the barrier to entry and to launch a brand and to create product and the cost of production was so high that we really relied on those brands for those moments. But again, Mac had its competitors, but their competitors weren't doing that. So maybe that's a testament to why they're still around today. This is also just a snapshot of the US market. If you look at Australia, it paints an even uglier picture of Progress. So in 1993, Elaine George became the first Indigenous model to appear on the COVID of Vogue magazine. It was incredibly important moment in Australia's history and was hoped to be the start of more diversity within the modeling industry. Even though the image was celebrated and sales of Vogue rose that month, another Indigenous model didn't appear on Vogue until 2010. And this was summarized by yarn.com I feel like I'm repeating myself already, but this point will come up a lot in today's episode where representation is only half the battle and representation is not inclusion. And having an Indigenous model on the COVID of Vogue and then it kind of going nowhere and the industry not following suit, just shows how reductive we've been in model representation. Kind of ticking this inclusivity box. And another thing I want to point out is that when all of these people and events were hugely significant, but when re. When history is retold like this, with all the biggest moments recounted so succinctly, it paints this false picture of the pace of progress. Often it's used as a sort of weaponizing incompetence where people are like, ugh, look at xyz, we've come so far. Like, shut up, we haven't. And I think that stat about Elaine George being the first Indigenous Australian on the COVID of Vogue and the only for 17 years really showcases that. What's interesting to just understand here is the way that before the 2000s, most of these movements were controlled by people in the public eye, like big celebrities or really big brands. Again, to that point of cost of entry. And this was the case for most of pop culture, which made it, like, really exclusive and really slowed down the demand for an inclusive industry. But then we get to the 21st century and that all starts to change. So in the 2000s, black owned beauty brands became a lot more more prominent. In O2, we got Nairobi Professional. In O3, we got curls. And we started to see a black beauty industry actually form the late 90s and early 2000s, we also started to have brilliant makeup artists like Sir John Pat McGrath that really, really altered the industry. And before researching for this episode, I never actually understood truly the importance and the significance of makeup artists. But what I didn't get is how makeup artists were the OG Trendsetters and they were the OG Beauty gurus. Without black makeup artists, there would be runways with black supermodels. Yes, as we started to see this in the 80s and 90s, that those models wouldn't have embodied the show the way that white models did, and therefore their work would be undermined for it. This has and would have drastically reduced the cultural impact of black supermodels by not giving them the same platform. But it's more than that, because beauty's power lies in the ability for self empowerment and expression. Without makeup artists showcasing how to shape the face or best eyeshadow colors and lip shades and brow shapes and brush shades for a deeper complexion, the introduction of a deeper foundation would be as half as monumental. Because I'm sure we can all attest to having a beauty product at home that even though you have it, doesn't mean you know how to use it. These makeup artists altered the industry from one that had a few black supermodels models on the Runway to creating trends with black women at the center. And that's that pop culture element. Because if you think now most people don't just go home and randomly be like, oh, I want to experiment with color, I want to experiment with makeup. You have to see it first. More often. You see someone that has done something or worn something that you want to recreate. And without those makeup artists setting those trends, showing us the way that black beauty could be celebrated. Because without those makeup artists creating those looks, you've got this industry that has created the product, but not created the want to use it. But if you see it on the Runway or you see it on Pinterest and you see the way that it looks like someone that looks like you, it creates that desire to create. It fosters that want to express yourself. And that's where these artists were monumental. We then get to 05 and YouTube launched black creators like Napshul85, aka Whitney White, Tiara Monet, Jackie Aina, Curly Penny, Mahogany Kells were revolutionary, as were Blaton X creators like Dolce Canny and Yuya. Or Middle Eastern creators like Huda Katan. Nepali creators like Promise Fan, Filipino American creators like the Heart Defensor. Their influence cannot be understated. Beauty YouTube democratized beauty education. Before to truly understand how to sculpt your face, other than just spending hours experimenting or going to something like a beauty school, that education was really, it didn't exist. You just had to learn by doing, which is still the case, but by giving that access to information and sharing tutorials, product reviews and tips tailored specifically to black hair and skin. This was crucial during a time where mainstream media often overlooked misrepresented black beauty needs. Again, to the representation and visibility point. The platform allowed black creators to showcase their unique styles, talents and experiences, providing visibility for diverse beauty standards, which helped them change the narrow definitions of beauty presented in traditional media. And there was this real community building like YouTube fostered a sense of community, period, but particularly in the beauty industry, whereby it created this two way dialogue with brands. Because once we got to the point where brands accepted its significance and its ability to market and sell products, they had to actually realize that it was this again, this two way conversation whereby they could tell you and talk to you about why you needed a product, but you were also able to speak back. It meant that brands couldn't ignore the need anymore. Like it was so, it was so visible because there were comment sections, there were Reddit threads, suddenly there was this record. All of the people that were being missed, all of the money that was being left on the table, to be frank, like the business opportunity, which again, we'll get into later. But it truly influenced product development in a way that we'd never seen before. The popularity of creators of creators of color on YouTube caught the attention of beauty brands, leading to increased demand for products tailored to their specific needs. And we also saw ethnically diverse creators really get platformed because we saw how people appreciated their creativity and what they brought to the table. The general public never wanted to exist in an industry where everyone looked the same and therefore was creating the same shit. Like it was so boring. So people were actually on YouTube seeking out creativity, particularly in the early makeup days where people were attracted to the different looks, the experimentational stuff, and you wouldn't subscribe to just hundreds of People that were doing the same thing. You sought out difference. And through that we found that people that were ethnically diverse could bring something different to the table and really foster this creativity, which is something that we've seen lack in so many industries. Wherefore they're built off this exclusivity. Like the Australian fashion industry for example. We have such a problem at the moment where all of the executive teams of the big kind of mid luxury to luxury luxury brands, they all look the same, they all have the same backgrounds and then therefore senses of humor and style and there's no creative difference. So we now have an Australian fashion industry where all the brands look the same and it's so goddamn boring. And the general public never wanted that. And that's why when, when YouTube launched, we had ethnically diverse people being platformed for almost the first time in history because the general public celebrated that difference. They sought out the creativity that they were lacking in mainstream culture. All of this momentum brings us to the 2000 and tens where McKinsey and co stated that the number of beauty brands in the market have nearly doubled in the last decade alone. Which really, really shows the pace of this being picked up when the influence is given to the public for all the reasons I just mentioned. But then we have the revolutionary Rihanna's Fenty beauty launch which offered an unprecedented 40 shades of foundation from launch. This was honestly something that we had like never seen before before. If a brand were to be inclusive, it would always be a journey in getting there. We kind of. They'd do a pre launch of tennis shades which were always predominantly white, like that's no joke. And then they would build their way up which was just so reductive. And I mean again, euphoria did it this year, so it's really not. And got all that gotten that much better. Or the beauty blender launch back in God, maybe 2016. But it was the same thing of like, hey, we will include you, but you'll be secondary. We will include you, but when it suits us like it was not true inclusivity. And then Rihanna came and changed all of that. She literally shifted what was accepted for the industry because she proved it was doable. She proved that, like, hey, you have no excuse really. It's the same that we see. This is a bit of a tangent, but Brittany Lee Saunders with her brand fate, she has a podcast episode where she was talking about how like her as a small business, she's a small fashion business, she's size inclusive. I'm pretty sure they go from sizes like 6 to 26. And she proved it like it's doable. And this was kind of, this was a different version of that. Huda Beauty did this also. I remember her posting a YouTube video about the fact that they were going to launch with, I believe it was 30 to 40 shades and they were planning on this really big launch with their faux Filter foundation launch. And Rihanna did it like a month beforehand. But again, we just were proving that it was possible. So then all of these brands that have been feeding us all this bullshit for years about how they were harder to formulate or they didn't have the capital or la da da da da liars, we knew you were lying. Now we can prove it. And then what was happening in the 2010s at this point too is that like our social media became more and more commonplace and we had more and more people of color that were being platformed. The general public became increasingly aware of this, of the state of the beauty landscape for women of color. Like you were suddenly able to understand an experience that was outside your own because you were sitting around listening to them all day. At this point on social media, we had trends like Black Girl Magic and Menolone Magic, which were social media movements that celebrated black beauty elegance, further highlighting the need for representation. They empowered black women to demand more 40 shades and brands began to respond by featuring more diverse models and influencers in their campaigns. We also need to recognize the influence of Nima Tang in this period. A beauty YouTuber, Nima began a series called the Darkest Shade, where she would review the darkest shade of new foundation launches, which most often inadvertently kind of forced Nima to be calling out brand, which meant that it, it quite often went pretty viral. But Nima explained earlier this year in 2024, how draining this style of content is and again just speaks to the way that diversity in beauty, where it shouldn't work on this current structure of like someone being racially discriminated against before the brand responds. The fact that that type of content was necessary back then and is still necessary now, like through creators like Gloria on TikTok, it's absurd. We then get to the 2000s, where again, with all of these movements through the 2000s, you would have thought that the beauty landscape might look alright, but no, certainly not. So black beauty brands have had to dilute themselves for shelf space. Aurora James, an unbelievable activist I will introduce properly in a little bit, told NPR that when she was trying to get brands on board with her 15 pledge, which was this idea that retailers at a minimum, the percentage of quality black products on shelves can be increased at a minimum to reach parity with the share of black representation in the US population. Aurora James told NPR that in speaking to retailers while trying to get them on board, she found that majority of retailers are pretty low, you know, 1 to 0% in some cases, she said, again mentioning that this is only in the US Think about what these numbers would be in Australia. We also had in 2020 a study titled because youe're Worth a Study of labels of women's foundations investigating foundation shade name names in 20 products defined that dark shades were largely named after the least valuable substances and objects, while lighter shades were labeled after decorative, valuable and precious objects. The Naked Truth, a data journalism piece by the Pudding with story by Ofane Amica and Data encode by Amber Thomas exposed how the names of over 6800 complexion products can reveal bias in beauty. And they found the same results which is just insane because the more studies you read about this this the more patterns of micro regressions you find and again to the point that I mentioned at the start of just the stacking of problems among problems and it has built this industry that is just against everything that beauty is so powerful at. Beauty is such an incredible opportunity whereby in every day the time that you spend, whether it just be having a shower or doing your makeup or washing your hair, it's a. It's a time of the day where you're at the center, you're at the core. Let alone all of the ways that it can be so expressive and it's just so heartbreaking breaking that so many people have been excluded from that an experience that has been so foundational in my life. Like I can speak to the fact that growing up bigger bodied I found beauty just accepted me with open arms in a way that fashion didn't. Because fashion would just make me feel so othered every time I would go and try and try on a new piece of clothing. But beauty never did that. Beauty was just always fun and expressive and joyful and the fact that so many other people never had that is soul crushing. And the fact that the the industry is perpetuating the same issues in 2024. Like I know I sound like I'm beating a dead horse, but my fuck In June last year Harvard Business Review published an article titled How Inclusive Brands Feel Growth and they looked at the growth of Barbies Mattel after Barbie was made into a diverse range of characters rather than a single white blonde Barbie the company cond in depth research to understand how customers felt about the famous doll and to determine whether more inclusive Barbies presented a strong market opportunity. The findings led to an expansion in the diversity of the dolls and in Mattel's overarching customer strategy. In 2016, the company expanded the Sew in style line of black dolls to include more skin tones, eye colors and hair type and also introduced Barbies with a range of body types. Today Barbie comes in 35 skin tones, 97 hair types and nine body types. Mattel's Hispanic red haired Barbie became a best seller. Barbie's revenues increased 63% from 2015 to 2022 before the boost of the film, which is such an important look at the way that when we talk about inclusivity in beauty, this is so much bigger than just an ethics or morals conversation. Of course that's at the foundation, but this is a business opportunity. Black women and women of color have money and they want to spend it. Stats like this from the from the Barbie piece I just read just proves the money opportunity here, the business opportunity. So if inclusivity fuels growth and there is an overwhelming gap in the market for black beauty, why hasn't it been filled? The answer is that there is an endless list of barriers to entry to building a black beauty brand. But firstly, let's have a look at funding. Yes, in 2024, many brands are able to bootstrap, which basically means that you invest your own money into starting it and that any money that the business makes, you invest it back in until you get to the point where the brand is profitable. In the US just 3% of black women run businesses that are over 5 years old. Why might you ask? Well, there's not a lot to gain. Black female founders earn an average revenue of just 24,000 compared to 100among all women owned businesses. So why the inequities? Because of the drastic lack of access TO Capital. With 61% of Black women self funding, their startup JP Morgan published this piece. Black women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs but the job isn't easy where they stated that the trend to self fund is likely because black women find it difficult to get funding elsewhere. Black business owners who apply for funding have a rejection rate that is three times higher than that of white business owners. Meanwhile, only 2% of venture capital funding goes to US female founded teams. So only 2% goes to women, period. And then black women are three times more likely to be rejected of just that 2%. Like the numbers are ludicrous to try and shed light on again the intersectionality of this issue. Let's look at Latinx founders in the U.S. a Stanford study in 2019 stated that Latinx owned companies contribute about $500 billion to the economy in annual sales and continue to grow considerably faster than the U.S. average about 34% over the past 10 years compared to 1% of all U.S. business owners. A Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative study have collected data since 2015 and found that while there are about 5 million Hispanic and Latinx owned businesses in the US, most start small and stay small with just percent generating at least 1 million in annual gross revenue. So you've built an industry that is excluding these people, therefore presenting an opportunity for people to create products for these people and then excludes them from being able to get money to feed that opportunity. It's just ludicrous. It's not much better in the UK either. In 2022 British Business bank analysis showed that while all female founders receive 9% of deals, this only equates to about 2% of investment dollars. The Women Led High Growth Enterprise Task Force report published by the UK government outlined that between 2009 and 2019 only 10 black female founders in the UK received VC funding. This equates to only 0.02% of total VC funding going to black female entrepreneurs, which is the same as 0.2 pence for every pound spent. What is additional salt on the wound is that it's been consistently outlined that black consumers are more likely than others to shop at beauty supply wholesale stores which typically don't have point of sales data. McKinsey and co outline how the loss of that information not only impacts a blind spot in the market and consumer data, but can be another barrier to secure funding. We have a similar problem here in Australia with indigenous businesses generating about 16 billion a year and employing more than 116,000 people, almost as many as the massive Coles retail group. For 16 billion a year. We hear so little about First Nation businesses and the Conversation wrote a piece on this and listed data integration as an issue perpetuating this lack of understanding. That same 2022 University of Melbourne study found that Indigenous contribute over 4.2 billion in wages, which supports this other statistic that First Nation business owners are 100 times more likely to hire other first nations people and are much more likely to support other first nations businesses. Building a beauty brand in any of these climates is just wild, as if you think of a room made up of the average beauty executives globally. Personally, I can't envision a single black person in that room, let alone Black woman. A 2021 report by McKinsey & Co. Titled Race in the Workplace the Black Experience of the US private Sector shows that if this current inequitable trajectory continues, it will take about 95 years for Black employees to reach talent parity across all levels of the private sector. What this means for beauty is that non black employees are in charge of the future of black brands. They decide what brands to sell, how many products to buy, where to place them in store, how to educate staff, where they sit on websites, what promotional activities they are involved in, and the list goes on. So while the ability to get funding and start a business is a huge issue, it's not the only issue because you're then suppose you are part of that 0.02% in the UK, you then rock up to a Sephora buying meeting or you walk up to a Boots buying meeting and you're presented with people that aren't able to empathize with what you're doing or they aren't able to see the product market fit because they aren't black. Lisa Price, who founded Carol's Daughter in 93, told McKinsey & Co that one of the hardest things when she was getting started was trying to get people, whether they were potential retailers, partners or investors, to empathize. She said that the biggest challenge for being a black founder was not being able to find people who could identify with the challenge of being a black founder. You have to figure out a way around it. You have to figure out a way to make it work. You have to figure out a way to convince people. As a white beauty founder, if I rock up to again, use the example of those retailer meetings, I'm able to show you my product and talk to you by trying to provoke in you the emotion that I want from my customer, which is demonstrating that need, therefore convincing you to purchase the product and to stock it. If I am trying to create a product specifically for black needs and there's not a black person in that room, but you get to decide whether or not that product makes it on the shelf. Hello, problem. Hopefully all of this paints a picture of the state of the industry because I want you to understand the gravity of some of the movements that I'm going to outline now that black women are putting in over time to achieve. So the 15% pledge that I mentioned earlier was started by Aurora James in the wake of the reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. She knew that the push for racial justice needed to include addressing the Black white wealth gap. As black squares flooded social media feeds and corporations vowed to do better when it came to diversity, James saw an opportunity for companies to take real action and back up their pledges. In the Years since, the 50% pledge has gotten over 28 retailers to take the pledge, shifting almost 14 billion of revenue to black owned businesses. With powerhouses like Emma Greed on the board, there is no question that this non for profit is going to be one of the movements to cause cosmic impacts to this issue. Another one I want to highlight is Pull up or Shut up started by Sharon Tudor in 2020 and was born out of a similar frustration. Sharon is also the founder of UOMA Beauty, which I also referenced at the start in the Lolly King Harper's Bazaar article. Tudor posted a video to her Instagram the day after Blackout Tuesday. This movement was and still is so significant. Within 72 hours without the boost of any celebrities or influencers over over 30 companies had pulled up, among them Sephora, Ulta Tatcha, L'Oreal Beauty Bakerie and Kylie Cosmetics. In this piece for Refinery 29 they wrote that since launching Pull up or Shut Up, Tudor has effectively put her money where her hashtag is launching Make It Black, a charity that partners with brands to deliver all black branded product lines with 100% of the net proceeds delivering grants to Black businesses. The first edition raised over 400K in grants announced that was given to eight Black female founders. There's no questioning that black founders and visionaries like Tudor and James are doing unbelievable work and not only spreading the message of black beauty problem, but actively reducing the friction and therefore excuses for brands to really make impactful change. However, the move towards an inclusive beauty industry should not rely on their work and voices alone. So yes, it is true that a lot of the improvements needed to work towards a more inclusive beauty industry does need to come from the top. But big brands make decisions on what to go to market with on the basis of the needs of the market and it's very important to not forget that we are the market. So be honest with yourself, educate yourself and take a look at the brands that you shop from and the creators that you follow and the voices that you amplify on social media. I will be the first to say that a few years ago I did this and I quickly realized that the creators I was following didn't reflect back to me the beauty industry that I wanted to be a part of. Also go further and educate yourself. In a second I'll list a bunch of resources that I highly, highly recommend you checking out. And a bunch of the articles I've listed today will be listed in the show notes like go and have a look yourself. I urge you to even just have a skim over some of the statistics. Personally I'm a numbers person, so when I see all of this stuff quantified it just blows my mind. And also there are so many brands that are doing true innovative work. It might feel like an effort in the beginning to seek those brands out, but once you do, you'll see so quickly kind of the true innovators versus this kind of commercial fallback that we get so used to in industry. So many of the biggest beauty brands are owned by like one of three giant conglomerate and that just becomes your understanding of the industry as a whole. But again, thanks to social media and thanks to E commerce, as the barrier to entry of launching brands brands is reduced, we're seeing so much in the indie space and so many brands are really rocking up to change things up and it's just so fucking exciting. And another solution suggestion, and I use solution loosely because it's not just kind of we do one thing and it fixes everything. But is this idea of a shade mandate? During the mind fuckery of the Youthphoria foundation saga earlier this year, the lipstick lesbians made a brilliant video on the topic and mentioned this idea of a shade mandate from retailers. This is an instance where call out culture is helpful because absolutely, products like this should should never have seen the light of day. They never should have been created in the first place. But the fact that they made it onto shelves is like an additional issue that's like taking it another step forwards. So the suggestion of a shade mandate is so brilliant because so many brands rely on the distribution of mega retailers like Ulta. I believe it was in the case for the Euphoria situation that they rely on them, the distribution of the problem, the platforming of the problem. So these products making it onto shelves is in the hands of buyers. If retailers had a shade requirement, a shade baseline, that would hopefully fix at least some of these issues. I also want to point out just a couple of the brands that are doing some really, really cool stuff and I just think should be on your radar. So Soft Rose, a part of the Sephora accelerate program for 2024, is setting out to fill a gap in the textured hair market for styling products. Founder Quani Burnett told Beauty Independent that when a black woman walks into Sephora, she's going to buy all of the black owned skincare and body brands and then when she gets to the hair aisle she'll probably go to the beauty supply store because she knows that those products are going to work for her hair. I've loved following the Soft Rose account over on TikTok and I'm so excited to see what they launch within the next year and onwards. Deeper is another brand that needs to be on your radar. I was lucky enough to connect with these founders over a call last year and this is a beauty launch you will not want to miss. So founded on a shared need for a tanner to even out their deeper complexions, Deeper is a body coverage brand that's good for skin and all its quirk. Their feature with Beauty Independent is terrific and again I will leave that in the show. Notes Cara is a personal favorite of mine. As a data science student, Cara is on a mission to simplify textured hair care. Cara's award winning Textured Hair Engine has indexed the world's textured hair data into insights driving innovation in the textured hair industry alongside their Textured Gap report that challenges the status quo and influencing how brands are developing their textured hair products going forwards. It is so fucking cool what they're doing. If you've enjoyed this discussion and want to continue reading, here are some recommendations I have have so at the core of much of this conversation was the black representation in the beauty industry. My McKinsey & Company. Have a look at the research yourself. It will terrify you. As I also mentioned earlier on the Black Beauty effect on Netflix, I have no idea how this seemed to slip through so many people's radars. My favourite content is when I'm being entertained yet educated and this does that brilliantly. The first piece I mentioned, the Evolution of Black Beauty by Lolly King for Harper's Bazaar is beautifully written and one of my favorite pieces of all time that that honestly altered the trajectory of my life and specifically my career is the naked truth. By the pudding. I will link all of that below. And thank you so much for being here. This episode was over 6,000 words in my little outline but I am certain there was stuff that I have missed. So if you have any thoughts, questions or just want to chat about anything that I've discussed, please send me a DM on Insta or on TikTok Airface Media. And if you enjoyed this episode I would love if you could please share it to your Instagram story as I would love for like minded people to find this episode and hopefully come back next week for episode two of the Bareface Podcast. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. This was a lot of fun and I'm really excited to see what this podcast can become. Foreign this episode was recorded on Ghana Country. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders past and present.