In late April, makeup brand Youthphoria faced backlash over the darkest shade in their Date Night foundation. This shade—which content creator Golloria George called out and has since been pulled from their website—was a jet black skin tint with no other pigment than black iron oxide. That, and pressing issues surrounding “clean” and “sustainable” beauty leave consumers with more questions than answers. How are beauty products made? Where are the ingredients sourced? Why are certain formulas trending?
Today, we found out in The Lab. To kick off the final day of the 30th ESSENCE Festival, panelists and cosmetic chemists Sister Scientist and Javon Ford joined ESSENCE’s senior beauty editor Akili King on the Beautycon stage to discuss. In the 1990s, “[brands] would take a medium-toned foundation that’s made up of white, yellow and red pigment, and they would just add black,” Ford told King, which caused ashy-looking, dull makeup with no undertones. Calling out Youthphoria, “they’re not really looking at human skin. Black is not a mixing color,” he said.
Despite brands like Fenty Beauty and WYN Beauty putting darker shades first, it is more common for brands to have a wide range of lighter-toned foundation, with limited shades for melanated skin. This is because most brands do not see Black consumers a profitable market to cater to. However, according to Sister Scientist, Black women spend almost three times the average beauty consumer. “These brands really didn’t think that we were spending money,” she said, investing only in shades for the general population. Now, “multicultural [people are] the general population.”
Meanwhile, as “clean beauty” is on the rise, other conversations about sustainability, chemicals, and how ingredients are sourced have come to the forefront. “There is no universal or federal-regulated standard for ‘clean beauty’,” Sister Scientist said. For most brands and retailers, they define clean beauty as holistic products devoid of “chemicals” or containing sustainably-sourced ingredients. “The fear-mongering and misinformation on social media is running rampant,” she said. “Everything has some sort of chemical in it.”
Ford acknowledged the irony of the term “clean” as a harmful preservative-light or preservative-free marketing tactic. “Clean products are the main ones being recalled nowadays,” he says, saying they may be contaminated with mold, fungus and bacteria. Nevertheless, “we have a lot of champion ingredients, like retinol and hyaluronic acid [in beauty products],” King said. Using a certificate of analysis, chemists receive these buzzword ingredients to then work with in the lab, before going to brands and retailers. Much like the beauty industry as a whole, and as Sister Scientist said, “there are a whole lot of layers; it’s like lasagna.”
