Where to find more Inclusive Beauty Brands
The beauty industry has recently been held accountable on a number of occasions due to brands not producing a wide enough range of shades, with the brands in question usually skipping over the production of darker shades. This is nothing other than discrimination. In a world that is designed predominantly by men, women often have the empathy to see the overlooked and embrace one another - including every skin color. This community-embracing famine characteristic should be prevalent in every industry, and without a doubt, starting with the beauty industry.
Lucky for us women, this push for inclusivity awakening is making a great impact on the beauty industry, starting with increasing development of new technology that is helping to produce custom matched formulas to skin colours.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused beauty giants such as Sephora, to close their brick-and-mortar stores and be fully online. This meant people couldn’t go into stores to get colour matched for foundation, concealer, or powder in-person. Therefore, customers had to guess what their colour was from the options available. This is when artificial intelligence (A.I) and artificial reality (A.R) came into play.
In reaction to this e-based tonal matching needed, makeup brands such as L’Oréal created new technologies to incorporate (V.R.) virtual reality and (A.R.) augmented reality into the customer color-match experience. L'Oreal's program is called Modiface, which allowed customers to try on makeup virtually in order to match their skin perfectly. This kind of AR technology naturally allowed more range in shades to fit every woman.
Typical to tradition, luxury brands are able to innovate first. Makeup inclusion is no exception. Dior’s Foundation Shade Analyzer is unmistakably unprecedented in its technology. With the push of a button the Dior Foundation Shade Analyzer can narrow down the best foundation formula and shade for each individual customer. Due to Dior’s extremely high standards of meticulously different pigments, this technology was a real breakthrough when it came to the inclusivity of the beauty industry. The LVMH brand has gone beyond just creating a wide range of shades like other beauty brands such as Fenti Beauty, and tailored technology to fit every single customer.
Following on Dior’s footsteps came more high street brands. This is a huge bonus as it allows inclusion technology more accessible to those of a lower income background. A notable example being No7. No7 is UK’s own Boots’ in-house brand. They have developed their own colour matching app. The app is simple to use and allows women of all colour to have the perfect foundation at a less hefty cost. No7 is also developing an app to help match lipstick and blush shades for different skin tones due to the success of the foundation matching app.
Still, luxury brands had inclusive software to make each customer’s foundation tone specific, and the UK's Boots’ had in-house lines, but the beauty industry needed a massive recognition and adaptation to inclusive skin tones. The first world-wide high street brand to create an online foundation finder was Maybelline New York. Similar to Boot’s No7 developments, Maybelline’s product line is priced for the everyday woman. However, Maybelline’s technology jump is a huge step in the right direction due to Maybelline’s enormous influence in the beauty industry and trends at-large. With Maybelline being the sole makeup sponsor of the entire New York fashion week this kind of innovation is bound to rub off onto the rest of the beauty industry. Maybelline creating their own online foundation finder truly is an example for inclusive beauty.
Innovative technology really is propulsing the fight for inclusivity in brands. The idea that technology can perfectly match your skin tone to a foundation formula means there is no excuse to discrimination any longer. The beauty brands that don’t jump on this innovative band wagon are bound to be left in the dust.