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COMPANIES & MARKETS
Beauty brands told black business matters
Activists demand that companies’ social media solidarity on race is reflected in hiring policies and product ranges
JUDITH EVANS — LONDON
LEILA ABBOUD — PARIS
When Sharon Chuter saw global beauty
brands endorsing the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement on social media, the
founder of Los Angeles-based Uoma
Beauty felt compelled to act.
The Nigerian-born former LVMH and
Revlon executive set up an Instagram
feed, @pullupforchange, and chal-
lenged the brands to release data on
their numbers of black employees.
“You all have statements and policies
about being equal opportunity employ-
ers, so show us the proof! PULL UP or
SHUT UP!” she wrote.
Ms Chuter’s campaign has helped
spark a larger backlash against the
$500bn beauty and personal care sector
this year.
Brands jumped to express support for
racial equality as Black Lives Matter
gathered pace. But angry responses
have forced them to confront what crit-
ics say are deeper failures in an industry
that helps shape social ideals of beauty.
Groups have been called out by activists,
influencers and staff over insensitive or
racist marketing messages and products
that glorify whiteness.
Commitments from Unilever and
L’Oréal to remove references to
“whitening” and “fairness” from their
skin-lightening creams, popular in India
and south-east Asia, were slammed by
activists as too little, too late. The Brit-
ish-Nigerian Hollywood actor John
Boyega quit as a brand ambassador for
Estée Lauder’s Jo Malone London brand
after it recast an advertising campaign,
removing him, for the Chinese market.
Former staff at start-up brand Gloss-
ier attacked its treatment of ethnic
minority employees in an open letter.
L’Oréal rehired mixed-race transgender
model Munroe Bergdorf to its diversity
board after having previously fired her
over her views on white supremacy.
‘The price I had to pay
to participate in these
companies was giving
up my identity’
Such episodes have drawn criticism
on social media, quickly crossed bor-
ders, and left brands scrambling to con-
tain the damage. But for Ms Chuter it
was the start of an overdue reckoning.
“The price I had to pay to participate
in these companies was giving up my
identity,” she said. “Seeing how much
they didn’t care about people who
looked like me — that was really trou-
bling. It doesn’t even make business
sense.”
International beauty and personal
care brands with their roots in the west
historically neglected non-white skin
and hair types, leaving independent
brands to fill the gap, according to cam-
paigners.
“In the world there is unconscious
bias, and people are becoming more and
more aware of that today and in the
industry at large,” said Esi Eggleston
Bracey, who heads the North American
beauty and personal care unit at Uni-
lever, whose brands include Dove, Sim-
ple and TRESemmé.
Demographic changes were one rea-
son for the shift, she said.
“I spent eight years in Switzerland,
then moved back to America [in 2016].
What struck me is how much America
has changed demographically. Today
40 per cent of Americans are people of
colour. I saw the visible difference. The
OCTOBER 24 2020
★ FTWeekend
demographic is growing so there is criti- Estée Lauder had long taken diversity
cal mass.” of skin colour into account in product
Some beauty companies had already development, said Susan Akkad, who
begun to broaden their ranges as they oversees multi-ethnic innovation for 25
pushed into Asian and African emerging Estée Lauder brands.
markets. “We have always been conscious of
the fact that we are global,” she said.
Market leaders in beauty products “We are not simply exporting an Ameri-
can beauty vision. We need to deeply
Global share, 2019 (%)
understand local markets and local
Cosmetics beauty culture.”
0 5 10 15 20 A turning point came in 2017 when
L’Oréal Fenty Beauty, created by music megas-
Estée Lauder tar Rihanna with French luxury group
Coty LVMH, burst on to the market. Fenty
LVMH offered 40 shades of foundation, later
Shiseido increased to 50, far more than most
other brands at the time. With
Fragrances Rihanna’s star power, Fenty reached
Coty almost €500m in sales after a year, in
L’Oréal one demonstration of the commercial
LVMH argument for diversity.
Puig Fenty triggered an arms race to offer
Estée Lauder more shades. L’Oréal-owned Lancôme
and LVMH-owned Dior both launched
Skincare 40-shade ranges around the same time.
L’Oréal Ms Chuter’s Uoma brand, launched last
Estée Lauder year, boasts 51.
Beiersdorf Gary Thompson, a black UK beauty
Shiseido blogger who was the first man to feature
Unilever in a L’Oréal cosmetics advertisement,
said: “A few years ago, make-up brands
Source: Euromonitor
were really backward and really slow. A
Section:Companies Time: 23/10/2020 - 18:37 User: andy.puttnam
brand would get away with releasing 10
shades and no black shades and people
would complain, but no one was listen-
ing. Now, we live in such a social media
time.
“We have direct access to brands and
they can really find themselves getting
cancelled.”
Yet Ms Chuter said beauty companies
needed to understand how their
broader ranges had been tailored to
white consumers.
For example, “a lot of women of col-
our tend to have short lashes that are
tightly curled up, so it’s very hard to use
a mainstream mascara”, she said.
Influencers such as Mr Thompson,
now a key link between beauty
brands and customers, are one fac-
tor in the faster pace of change.
Nigerian-American beauty
YouTuber Jackie Aina, with 1.7m
Instagram followers, is an outspo-
ken critic of brands’
failures on race. Male
and transgender
influencers have
also gained prom-
inence.
The global
nature of social
media has
made it risk-
Page Name: CONEWS3,
24 October/25 October 2020
ier for brands to use marketing mes-
sages that might be acceptable in one
country but offensive elsewhere.
Ms Akkad said: “Social media means
you can’t really ringfence anything any
more, so companies need to have more
cross-cultural understanding of how
their messages are going to be received.”
Hair is another battleground. Uni-
lever’s TRESemmé haircare brand last
month became the target of street pro-
tests in South Africa after it ran online
ads describing black women’s hair as
“frizzy and dull” and “dry and dam-
aged”. Blonde, white women’s hair was
labelled “normal”.
The racial politics of hair has a
charged history. During apartheid in
South Africa, the so-called pencil test of
hair thickness was used to determine
racial identity. So the TRESemmé
advertisement met a furious response.
Clicks, the pharmacy whose website the
advertisements featured on, briefly
closed its stores, while several retailers
removed TRESemmé products.
Ntombenhle Khathwane, founder of
haircare brand AfroBotanics, said the
TRESemmé advertisements were “a
major shock” but reflected “an issue
around corporate culture”.
Unilever South Africa promised to put
in place new diversity measures. It
denounced the advertisements as “rac-
ist, and we apologise unreservedly”. Yet
‘Today 40% of Americans
are people of colour. The
demographic is growing so
there is critical mass’
hair also presents an opportunity.
Ms Khathwane’s company caters for
the increasingly popular “natural hair”
movement, embracing hair styled with-
out straightening chemicals, extensions
or wigs.
Unilever’s largest brand, Dove, has
advertised itself on a platform of diver-
sity since its Campaign for Real Beauty
launched 16 years ago. More recently it
co-founded the Crown Act campaign,
which lobbies in the US for laws barring
hair-based discrimination, such as
school and workplace policies that ban
Clockwise from dreadlocks, braids and Afros. So far,
left, Rihanna seven US states have introduced “Crown
onstage for her Act” laws.
Savage X Fenty The company had also expanded its
show in Los product range for skin with higher mel-
Angeles this anin levels and textured hair, said Ms
month, John Eggleston Bracey. In May, Unilever’s
Boyega, Susan Dove, Suave and SheaMoisture held a
Akkad, and four-week virtual series called #Wash-
skin-lightening DayLive, offering haircare tips for black
creams on sale women.
in New Delhi. “It’s super-important that we have
below, Sharon marketing that is not only inclusive but
Chuter — Kevin Mazur/ culturally connects with the consumers
Getty
that we serve,” said Ms Eggleston
Bracey.
Campaigners agree that connection
starts with hiring. Ms Chuter persuaded
six of the US’s 10 largest beauty brands
to reveal numbers on staff diversity.
None matched the proportion of black
employees in the US population — 13 per
cent — and just two, Estée Lauder and
Shiseido, met or exceeded the roughly
10 per cent of US graduates who are
black. She is raising funding to make
Pull Up for Change a fully-fledged cam-
paign group.
“The beauty industry is about to have
an awakening,” said Ms Chuter.
“Every single time they bet against
the black consumer — every time
they get it wrong.”
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