Rihanna is a talented woman who is now a beauty industry icon.

Fenty Beauty’s quick success

The music and fashion star recently unveiled Fenty Beauty, an inclusive makeup line. Fenty’s main products are its foundations, primers, contour products, and concealers that match the skin tones and undertones of women of color.

Each of Fenty’s products come in varied colors. For example, the brand’s foundation comes in 40 different hues. Fenty also has a lipgloss—a rosy nude with a hint of simmer—that Rhianna swears works “well on all skin tones.”

So far, the brand has received praise for its diverse products. Women of color with dark skin tones are easily able to find a foundation that’s a good match. The line also boasts a foundation that albino customers can confidently wear, Teen Vogue reports.

Women of color and the beauty industry

Although Fenty Beauty isn’t the first brand that’s addressed the makeup needs of WOC—Black Up Cosmetics, IMAN Cosmetics, Black Opal, L’Oreal Paris True Match, and many more brands have over the years—it’s Rhianna’s star power that could send her brand, and all of its hues, mainstream.

“Rihanna’s global appeal makes the success of Fenty Beauty the closet thing to a sure bet,” Cardyn Brooks, writer and innovator, says. “Her public persona transcends ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, social class, nationality.”

Fenty’s immense and quick success may be what the mainstream and blindingly white beauty industry needs to make it the intersectional place it should be. After all, women of color adore wearing makeup that’s fun, pleasant to wear, and matches their skin tone.

However, this universal change may, unfortunately, hinge on sales.

Money counts

“[Change] will come down to Fenty Beauty maintaining ‘comeback’ sales, and a loyal following before other brands follow suit,” Amber Stanfield, beauty blogger, says.

And Mindy Green, Owner of MG Beauty, reiterates how important sales are by explaining that in the past, other brands have attempted to address the makeup needs of WOC, but have ended production on their lines because of sales.

“I can recall when Revlon introduced the Color Style line in the mid ’90s with a strong ad campaign featuring Veronica Webb and other top models of color,” Green says.

“It appeared to be doing fairly well. Then, Revlon pulled the plug. I’m sure they sighted sales less than expected or projected. But how do you know what to expect or project for something unprecedented?”

However, if Fenty continues to sell, it can only improve the industry, Diane Elizabeth, founder of Skin Care Ox, adds.

“Fenty has received rave reviews from women who have been largely without a solution for their whole lives,” Elizabeth says. “This passion and fervor will translate into fantastic sales and put every other makeup brand on notice.”

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Black women are too often disrespected by the beauty industry and the world at large.

This disrespect comes in many forms. Sometimes, it’s in microaggression form — like when a white woman thinks it’s okay to touch a black woman’s hair because it’s “stylish”. Other times, it’s in a racist form — like when an app adds a blackface filter. And then there are the times when disrespect turns into legit assault and disregard for human life.

The beauty industry is the problem

Unfortunately, 2017 is fraught with instances where people unintentionally — and quite often intentionally — fetishize black looks and styles.

For example, a makeup artist recently did something that she called the “Chocolate Challenge” to “celebrate” women from various cultures. As if the title of the challenge wasn’t enough to make one’s skin crawl, the artist continued her “challenge” by transforming a white model via blackface.

Then, Jeffree Star launched a makeup campaign that featured a light-skinned model’s “deliberately darkened” skin. And let’s not forget that Kim Kardashian’s KKQ beauty promo photo showed her “several shades darker than usual,” Teen Vogue recently reported.

Why the beauty industry fetishizes black women

Dr. Dina Strachan, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City with a faculty appointment at NYU, explains that this type of oversight in the beauty industry happens because people fetishize what they lack. And the beauty industry under presents black women. (Perhaps this is why cosmetics for black women are more toxic.)

“It is hard to represent and protect what one is unfamiliar with,” Dr. Strachan says.

When more black women are bosses, mistreatment could stop. That’s when black women could help expand the perspective and advocate for their own interests, Strachan explains.

Christian Simone, a lifestyle blogger, adds that within the beauty industry, the desire to appear cool often comes at the expense of black women.

“Black women have often created or set the tempo out of true need and creativity,” she says.

“Being poverty-ridden or unable to find things that speak to us [helped us] create.”

However, when other races noticed this creativity, they took what they liked and shamed the people who created the “look” they praised.

“From taking things, such as cornrows and calling them fish braids, or wearing bamboo earrings and calling it vintage… I believe the black woman has always been the most unwatered fragrant flower that constantly rises,” Simone says.

“At times even our own rip us in order to be seen by other races as acceptable. However, I boldly allow my beauty to shine. A true twirl on your haters.”

The world needs to step up, STAT

Many people don’t take black women seriously. This lack of respect causes many people to treat black women poorly. One truly horrible example of this came to light in the past few weeks.

In 2015, Charneisha Corley got pulled over while running an errand. Corley alleges that “she was then subjected to a public cavity search of her vagina after Harris County officers claimed they smelled marijuana in her car,” Jezebel reports.

Dashcam footage of the altercation was recently released on the website of Sam R. Cammack. Cammack is Corley’s attorney.

The police officers who searched Corley were indicted, but “the charges were dropped in early August… [this] is what prompted the video’s release on Cammack’s website,” Jezebel reports. (And according to Fox 26, the officers involved in the incident are still working for the department, although they are on administrative duty.)

Why this keeps happening

Dr. Strachan points out that the dehumanization of black women’s bodies is part of American history — it’s nothing new. “Think of how black women were treated during slavery — [they were] raped, beaten, wet nursing the children of their captors, bought and sold.”

Simone adds that black women are financially, emotionally, and mentally taken advantage of, too. “The mental confusion that haunts the black woman from her appearance to how she interacts with the world is damning,” she explains.

“The pressure of making sure one doesn’t appear [as] anything but acceptable to others is hard… Other races believe they are better. Other minorities don’t want to associate [because] they don’t want to fight the status quo.”

After all, when a human is not seen as a valid person, it’s easy for others to dehumanize them.

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SeriesInundated with marketing messages, Americans are tricked into believing products equal happiness.

Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Studies On The Development Of Consumerism

“All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.” -Alfred L. Kroeber, The Superorganic

If you took a time machine back to 200 years ago, you would see families living modest lives: busy working at home tending their vegetable patches or livestock, cooking and eating family dinners, making their own soaps, sewing and mending their own clothes, using what they had down to the last scrap, and buying as few products as they possibly could to maintain the comforts of their lives on their modest incomes.

Fast forward to today, where most American households buy everything they own from a store and consume far more than they actually need; nowadays, community refers to our Facebook friends, we home-make almost nothing for own consumption, we have no idea where our food or other products come from and we dispose of barely used products regularly, in order to replace them with something new for the sake of newness. We’ve become a consumer society which currently consumes approximately 1 1/2 times the amount of resources that the planet can produce annually.

What’s driving our culture toward consuming is a recipe based on keeping up with the Joneses, a rise in societal shopaholism and our basic survival skills at work within society. It’s also safe to say that in the name of industrial prosperity, the economies of Western civilization have pushed us to this point.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that in the eyes of capitalism, we’ve become trapped. Industry marketers and advertising experts have been able to turn our own survival skills against us in the name of turning a profit.

Consumer Grooming
Ever catch your mind wandering while looking at a fashion magazine or a sexy billboard, thinking, “I wish I could have that…” These thoughts may not in fact be yours, rather a direct product of the marketing industry’s labors to grab your attention. Consumer grooming is the method of applying psychologically embedded imagery, strategically placed where they will be seen by the masses, to influence the purchasing choices of the global population. Our human desires to be loved, respected and admired are played upon through airbrushed images modeling sex, status, wealth, and beauty aspirations. This is not a new thing, it’s been in the works since before the Victorian Period.

A portrait of the Astor family stiffly posing, shows the idyllic life of the extremely rich during the Industrial Revolution. While age perhaps has made this image more elegant to our modern eyes, this would be the Victorian equivalent to today’s Kardashian family Christmas card.

Madeline Levine, modern day psychologist and author of The Price of Privilege, describes in her book the negative effects affluence has on children growing up in wealthy families due to dramatic changes in American culture as “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.”

The Psychological Underpinnings Of Advertisements

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate“. -Victor Lebrow, Economist, 1955

Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings. In the 1890s, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen gave sweeping attacks on production for profit, propelling the rise in conspicuous consumerism in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. He noted a spreading consumer trend that appeared during the Industrial Revolution with the emergence of nouveau riche moguls who were displaying their wealth and social standing prominently through conspicuous consumption of material goods, ultimately evoking envy among their neighbors.

Apparently their neighbors were taking the bait, right along with the growing middle class. Back in 1899, Veblen, scathingly noted a general trend in society that people were willing to give up their quality of living, their health/family/spiritual life balance, in order to appear wealthy through their dress.

For all his studies and reports, whom did his theories aid the most? It was the industrial businessmen who had much to gain from reading his findings even if he carped at the wealth throughout his work. Many of the conclusions he came to showed that given the opportunity, society could easily be encouraged to consume aggressively through different forms of peer pressure. His theories outlined how wasteful habits of over-consumption was spreading, giving industries, like the fashion and beauty product industries, the key to pushing huge amounts of unnecessary products to unconscious consumers.

By the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom theorized that lifestyle changes brought on by the industrial age were inducing a “philosophy of futility” in the masses, which would only increase fashionable consumption. By the 1930s, advertising executives in a budding industry realized that they could capitalize on the social phenomenon of consumerism by encouraging consumers to compete with their neighbors for social status. In 1932, Earnest Elmo Calkins, a leading ad executive noted to colleagues that “consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.”

Study after study has been written about our social tendency to conform to a collective wasteful behavior. While these studies do not seem to be reaching most of the population to educate, economists and businessmen have been eager to read them, continually thrilled to learn more about the harnessing potential behind the phenomenon of consumerism.

The Arsenal Of Advertisement Aimed At Consumers

The advertising, media, and marketing industries work to create and place ads in front of the people who are most likely to imitate and be influenced by it. Namely this would be people interested in anything related to societal activities: those who follow culture through magazines, TV, movies, or by surfing the net, live in an urban environment, or who at very least, listen to the radio.

In order to do accomplish their goal, the ad industry has come up with continually innovative methods that encourage the social drive to “keep up with the Joneses.” Celebrities since time immemorial have been brought in, images of excessive materialism carefully placed for target audiences to see and in turn, a consumer response to go shopping. This method of advertising has been highly effective at driving sales and has become one of the most effective forms of marketing excessively used today.

Vintage Elizabeth Taylor selling hair cream with a brand slogan attached, appealed to women that wanted to have hair like the  iconic Taylor. They didn’t mention that the cream is made with toxic chemicals or that you might need a team of hair stylists along with the cream to achieve her coif.

And Michael Jordan probably sold more shoes for Nike than anyone in history, while making millions doing it. Like Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork Bag, Nike turned Jordan’s namesake shoes into a “limited edition” to drive consumers into fearing that they might not get a pair. This effectively allowed the company to raise the prices of the products incredibly to meet their high demand, adding consumer status and “value” to the shoes. Quite often the Air Jordan shoes would be back-ordered for months or until the next edition was released.

The fashion media even invented their own celebrities. In the 1980s and 90s supermodels were born when the industries realized that they could draw attention to images featuring favorite “iconic” models, unusual in their looks, who had loads of attitude and glamour. Glamazons like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Cambell, Claudia Schiffer, and Linda Evangelista became household names and were easy to recognize in fashion spreads.

Women fell in love with the images of their beautiful “lifestyles” portrayed in fashion magazines and they achieved celebrity status for their pretty faces and extraordinary physiques. Women poured over their favorite fashion magazines: playing name that model, studying their make-up, hair and styling in an effort to emulate their style, beauty, and allure. Completely distracted by the pretty faces adorned with cosmetics and designer products, the under laying message that was embedded in the images easily sunk in. Of course, one would have to buy the products these beauties were modeling in order to emulate them.

Reality TV shows, featuring made-up, pseudo-celebs, have been devised specifically for product placement.

Superficiality, rage, greed, jealousy, envy, and competitiveness are now gratuitously displayed, on shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, America’s Top Model, and Jersey Girls. All three shows invite viewers to embrace petty drama into their own lives and suggest that celebrity status might follow, even for people who completely lack talent.

The underlying message in all this media-based imagery is, “If you buy our products, you too will be beautiful and admired,” but the obvious question begging to be asked should be, “What are we hiding?”

Image: Tinou bao

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