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On the outside, the world of makeup is like diving into a treasure chest. You experiment and sample and create your own niche. Which eyeshadow palettes speak the most to you, which youtube tutorials are you going to excitedly follow when you buy a new palette, and which beauty blogger and youtube make up artist are you going to religiously admire? All of the glitter and glory and perfect cat eyes start with a blank canvas. A process of matching and blending and highlighting and contouring. What creates that canvas? Foundation. Different shades, different textures and different brands of foundation.
However, for people of color, many are struggling to enjoy the beautiful world of makeup because their canvases are grey, or nowhere near their skin tone, or bright red or even close to the colors orange and yellow than an actually existing skin tone. What should be a fun skirt through the aisles of ULTA or Sephora and celebration of what beautifully named foundation fits your skin tone like “Sand” or “Toasted beige,” has become for people of color a walk into an aisle praying that they can find something that closely resembles their skin tone or at least two foundations that they can mix together to achieve this.
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Caucasian individuals have every shade available to them, as do extremely light-skinned people of color. They can go to a new foundation line launch and expect to have their color available to them, it is only a matter of being color matched. For people of color, this is not always the case. Two foundations must be bought and mixed together, costing more money and more of a hassle to have a simple basic makeup look. Usually, when a foundation line does have darker shades they are extremely minimal as well as jumping from a mahogany to a cocoa while forgetting all of the shades in between.
Even more disturbing has been the almost purposeful exclusion of people of color from foundation lines as a marketing ploy. A company will release their foundation line and receive backlash on its lack of diversity. Then the company will all of a sudden release an apology and miraculously formulate darker and more varied skin tones as if they had them all along and were keeping them a secret. This strategy aids the company in gaining more attention and popularity and simultaneously continues to alienate people of color from the norm.
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What separates the Too Faced, Born This Way foundation line from the rest of the lines that receive backlash and “do better” is the fact that the born this way foundation line incorporated Jackie Aina, an influential woman of color to give feedback and help them to formulate new areas of improvement within their foundation. Rather than apologetically slapping on new and darker shades that only fit a select few people of color, Too faced took input from a woman of color that is active in the makeup artist community and who regularly comments on the shade range of foundation lines.
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New and varied makeup shades make way for more input from people of color in the makeup community. likewise, the addition of Jackie Aina paves the way for more people of color to be included in the making of the foundation process.
The Born This Way foundation line allows people of color to not feel like a last resort. It allows them to finally be included in a space that they should have always been included in. It helps them to see that not only do they matter as customers, but that they are seen and thought of in the world of makeup and beauty. Too Faced is setting the right tone for other makeup brands to follow on within the path to diversity in the makeup universe.
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