Estée Lauder is an American multinational manufacturer and marketer known for selling its quality skincare, fragrances, makeup, and hair care products. This cosmetics conglomerate business owns other successful beauty brands such as La Mer and Clinique. The company is doing business globally since the year 1960.
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Estée Lauder’s questionable and “culturally insensitive” language used in its marketing campaigns:
With the #BLM Black Lives Matter moment, one way we can all contribute to this movement is by doing our homework as consumers and research about the brands we buy from and check if they promote a racist mindset. If they do, we should stop giving them business, as there should be no place for any racist companies in the market. So, many consumers have finally started noticing which brands are engaged in racist practices, and based on that, Estée Lauder companies have been accused of using “culturally insensitive” language in advertising their skin lightening products.
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Earlier this summer, after the company’s employees and consumers pointed out this issue – Estée Lauder Cos. responded by deciding that they will be re-evaluating their makeup and skincare lines for “cultural sensitivity”. The language that consumers found insensitive were words like skin “lightening” and skin “brightening” and skin “whitening”. People feel that this kind of marketing is promoting a racist mindset that dark/ black skin tone is undesirable and light/ white skin tone is the true standard of beauty.
What is Estée Lauder doing to rectify this error?
Susan Akkad, the Estée Lauder senior vice president revealed that the staff will be making sure these errors are rectified as they did not intentionally mean to hurt the sentiments of any of their consumers. “We need to make sure that our communication is positive and sensitive in every part of the world,” assured Akkad. Besides, the company is planning to launch a wider range of shades and products that appeal to its diverse customer group.
Moreover, in response to this Estée Lauder made a long checklist to fix this issue, and they started working with more Black-owned businesses than ever before, partnering with Black community organizations, to maximize their Black hiring ratio and also have started donating to Black causes.
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Do you feel that Estée Lauder came up with a fair solution to this problem? Feel free to comment your views on this down below!