Why Is It So Hard For Black Women To Find Effective Beauty Products?

As I began work on my Project I, I decided that I wanted to write a blog post here about the problem with the black women and the beauty industry. My Project I idea is to do a qualitative analysis study on how the beauty industry markets to women of color. To complete this study, I plan on examining the September issues of several top women's fashion magazines. I also plan on examining ESSENCE magazine as away to compare the beauty ads there (which I know from personal experience of working there) should all feature black women. I also know from personal experience that, outside of ESSENCE, it's very rare to see ads like that within other publications.

I started covering the beauty industry almost immediately after completing my undergraduate work in 2004. I started as a Beauty Writer for Women's Wear Daily before working as a Beauty Editor for ESSENCE. This is when I first began to notice the difficulty in finding beauty products such as foundation and lipstick that came in the correct shades for women of color. Yes, they worked as a cosmetic should, but they never quite blended in well or they always left behind a weird top layer of white looking ash. 

I've covered this topic before for the print edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, but the question still lingers of why it's so hard for black women to find beauty products. Rihanna recently launched a collection of beauty products called Fenty Beauty exclusively for SEPHORA and the most epic part about the news is that she came right out with 40 shades of foundation. Women of color everywhere went nuts about this and shared their happiness about finally finding the perfect foundation shade for their skin tone. Obviously, I had to cover the news for Cosmo.com and I wrote a story that featured quotes from Rihanna as well as Senior Director of Fenty Beauty Management Erin O'Neill. 

This was such a fun story to write and I look forward to finishing up my project and presenting the information that I find to the class.