A Year in Review: 2018 Beauty Milestones
2018 has been a year of many ups and downs for the beauty industry. As the year draws to a close, it’s important to take a moment to highlight the great strides beauty brands have taken to be more inclusive of women of color. Highlighted below are some of these milestones.
Amy Deanna became the first CoverGirl model with vitiligo
During Covergirl’s I Am What I Makeup Campaign, they launched an ad for their new truBlend foundation. In it, Deanna can be seen using the tool to enhance her skin’s natural pigmentation instead of correcting it.
“Vitiligo awareness is something that is very important to me. Being given a platform to do so means so much. I welcome all appropriate questions about vitiligo. At the end of the day I am just like everyone else, I just happen to have spots. It’s a part of my identity, but it doesn’t define who I am … I work with CoverGirl; I’m a black woman; I have vitiligo. That is empowering.”
2. TooFaced brought on famous influencer Jackie Aina to help expand their Born This Way foundation shades
After Fenty Beauty’s legendary debut with 40 foundation shades (more than any brand has ever dropped at once), other brands started playing catch up and expanding their foundation shades. What makes TooFaced stand out on this list is the fact that they brought on a woman of color to help them get the shades right.
"Just because a brand has a lot of dark shades, doesn't mean that people are wearing them. By bringing on someone with dark skin to create these new colors, Too Faced really wanted to get it right," Jackie Aina told Allure.
They created nine new shades, three of which are deeper than the previously darkest shade, Cocoa.
3. Allure awarded Fenty Beauty with the 2018 Breakthrough Award
Photo: Nadine Ijewere/Allure
Back in September, Rihanna was on the cover of Allure’s 22nd annual "Best of Beauty" issue. They awarded her the 2018 Breakthrough Award for what they described as Fenty’s "rallying cry for inclusivity in beauty [that] was heard around the world," in a press release. In lieu of an interview, Allure asked Rihanna’s fans, including friends, to write letters expressing what Fenty means to them.
Here is one from model Slick Woods, a close friend of Rihanna:
“People loved the idea of Slick, but you gave me countless platforms to let people actually fall in love with who I am. You made inclusivity cool, and that’s revolutionary,” she wrote. “Now people are putting money toward inclusion, rather than putting money toward a certain supremacy. It’s a beautiful switch in pace.”
Fenty Beauty made history as the first brand or product that Allure has ever given a Breakthrough Award.
4. Mac and Nyma Tang created the perfect red lipstick
Beauty reviewer Nyma Tang runs a Youtube series called The Darkest Shade where she tests out the darkest shades of various products including foundation, concealers, bronzers, etc. to see if they match her skin tone.
"I started wearing makeup when I was a little older, like 21, and that's when I started realizing that there's really not much out there for me," Tang told Refinery29. "I think a lot of companies are playing catch up right now. We still need those deeper sculpting products, bronzers, and contour powders — even eyeshadows need to be more inclusive and dark skin-friendly."
In September, MAC introduced their collaboration with Tang, a limited-edition warm red lipstick that is formulated to work with both fair and deep skin.
5. Naomi Campbell is named the new face of NARS
There’s no question that Naomi Campbell is one of the most iconic supermodels to grace the runway. Surprisingly, after almost 30 years in the industry, she admitted that this will be her first beauty campaign.
“I’ve never done one for anyone,” Campbell said in a 2017 interview with Evening Standard. “People say, ‘Oh you’ve got beautiful skin’ and yet I’ve never done one.” She shared that black models still face discrimination and that she still has to bring her own makeup to some fashion runways and shoots because makeup artists don’t have her shade.
Campbell is no stranger to breaking barriers, from being the first black model to appear on the front cover French Vogue in 1988, as well as American Vogue a year later. For her, fronting NARS new campaign is a testament to her long-standing friendship with the François Nars, the company’s founder. She remembers fondly that he made her her own foundation when she was first starting out and could not find a shade that matched her.
"Naomi is a living icon and brings such strong personality to the camera,” Nars said in the Instagram post announcing the campaign. “She and I are like family. I have known her since the very beginning of her career. From the start, I have admired her, her beauty, and her style.”
