Aja Mangum is a beauty editor for New York Magazine and she has a problem. Because she’s a Black woman of a particular skin tone, the range of make up products for her is limited. So what should be an enjoyable outing for a woman interested in beauty products and fashion inevitably becomes frustrating. She describes those
experiences in an article for New York Magazine and the nub of the problem lies in the following two paragraphs:
I’m also, obviously, a beauty editor, and the lack of cosmetics—particularly the basics, like foundation and concealer—for my skin tone has always bothered me. When I ask companies about extending their lines for women of color, I’m usually told some version of “we’re working on it,” or shown one or two dark shades. Counterside makeovers can be humiliating; I end up in whiteface or am told point-blank they don’t have my color. And it’s great that former supermodel Iman has developed a makeup line for women of color, but I want variety.
[…]
“You can cover, say, 80 percent of light skin tones with six shades of foundation,” says Sarah Robbins, Bobbi Brown’s global vice-president of product development and marketing, as she explains the complexities of light, medium, and deep coverage to me. “As skin tones get deeper, they get much more complex in tonality, so six shades don’t cover that complexity in depth. It takes longer to get it right.” She’s clearly empathetic, but there’s also business to consider. “What’s difficult is to rationalize making SKUs [stock-keeping units] when you don’t know how many women you’re going to be able to service. We want to service everyone, but the reality is that it’s very difficult to do.”
This problem may seem minor at first, but it is the sort of everyday humiliation a lot of people face because they don’t fit the fashion and beauty industry’s standards. Not just if your skin colour is outside the acceptable range, but if you’re too fat, thin, short or tall, you will often have trouble finding good clothes. From a business point of view, this makes good sense for the reasons given in the second paragaph: there may be a lot of potential non-standard customers, but they’re all non-standard in different ways.
But there’s also a lot of (unconscious) racism and bigotry at work here, as has been noticed here before. A cosmetics house like L’oreal creating makeup lines for Black women? That would lower their image! The supposedly universal image of beauty is still white and blonde and anything that differs from it runs the risk of becoming a brand for Black, or Asian or fat people rather than something with universal appeal.