By SoEun Park
Governance & Society
Introduction
It is logical that when demand from consumers is growing, the supply should also do the same due to the nature of the capitalistic markets of profit maximization. This argument is further reasonable if the spending power of consumers is there. Thus, it is paradoxical that only some beauty companies invest in makeup products for dark skin despite the consumer demand and spending power. The New York Times Article “They Couldn’t Find Beauty Tutorials for Dark Skin. So They Made Their Own.” and BeautyInc Article “TikTok Sensation Golloria George on Beauty’s Inclusivity Problem — and How Brands Can Do Better” illustrates this paradox and beauty influencers efforts to change the beauty industry for the better in the inclusivity of dark skin products and representation. The article “They Couldn’t Find Beauty Tutorials for Dark Skin. So They Made Their Own” illustrates the dark-skinned influencers’ incentive for making their own YouTube channels to provide unavailable tutorials and the progress and limitations the beauty industry has pushed for creating darker shades. Similarly, “TikTok Sensation Golloria George on Beauty’s Inclusivity Problem — and How Brands Can Do Better” showcases Tioktoker Golloria George sharing her experience as a Black beauty content maker and her interactions with the audience and beauty brands. This paper will explore the relationships between the markets (beauty industry companies), beauty influencers, and consumers and why so few beauty companies invest in makeup products for dark skin despite consumer demand and spending power.
The First Party: Beauty Influencers
There are three main parties within the beauty industry when it comes to markets and firms for dark-skin makeup: the beauty industry, the consumers who have dark skin, and beauty influencers (who are also part of the consumer sector). YouTube Beauty Bloggers like Jackie Aina, Monica Veloz, and Nyma Tang in The New York Times Article are self-taught and show makeup tools that work step by step. Most importantly, they provide tutorials for dark-skinned women to be confident and stand up for themselves through the medium of makeup. Their earnings depend on the number of subscribers, views, and ads within their videos. According to Shopify, “to start earning money directly through YouTube, you must have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year” (Kumar). The three women mentioned collectively above have nearly four million YouTube subscribers; thus, this showcases how much money they earn as beauty bloggers. These influencers demand beauty products as consumers and earn money as influencers with a source of income, attention, and a following. They have a different type of exchange with beauty companies, helping them market the product rather than a regular consumer buying it off the shelf.
However, the bread and butter––the source of income of a beauty blogger-–is to “use a product and review it to followers” and answer questions such as “Does it make her face greasy? Does it cover up scarring? Is it worth the price?” (Garcia). This task becomes difficult when there aren’t many dark-skinned products to choose from that are produced by beauty companies. The Tik Tok sensation Golloria George is in a similar position to the three women mentioned above. According to Business Insider, Tik Tok pays users via its Creator Fund and Tiktok Pulse ad program, with its “Payouts from its fund and ad-revenue sharing range between a few cents to around $8 per 1,000 views” (Whateley). Through this social media medium, she shares her experiences as a Black content creator and beauty lover and how brands can make meaningful strides to address beauty’s racial inequality and problem. Nevertheless, her task has also been difficult when reviewing products as there are not a lot of dark-skinned products to choose from. Even economics cannot explain why demand exceeds supply for these products, but the amount of products in the market is insufficient.
The Second Party: Consumers
The second party is consumers; these consumers are black women who want to invest in beauty products but have few choices. They are limited by the number of products in the market due to the beauty companies that refuse to produce them. They watch YouTube videos of honest reviews from influencers, then choose not to buy the products because of the lack of shades for the company, which lowers revenue for the beauty companies and is detrimental to them.
The Third Party: Beauty Companies
Lastly, beauty companies are markets that treat women with darker skin as “an afterthought” at the bottom of the totem pole (Garcia). They actively overlook and “leave women with higher pigment out of the conversation” (Garcia). Here, market refers to the aggregate set of supply and demand. Beauty industries produce less supply while there is more demand for dark-skinned products, resulting in supply not meeting the demand.
On the other hand, these beauty industries can also be referred to by the second definition of markets, where firms are engaged in inter-related exchange practices. Intriguingly, different firms have different approaches to the lack of dark-skinned products, especially between small and big companies. After watching Golloria’s videos, smaller companies have been reaching out to take accountability. In contrast, big companies that have been around for decades are unwilling to accept that they have been doing things wrong. People like Jorrod Blandino, co-founder and chief creative officer of Too Faced, asked Ms. Aina for help with “nuances of color and textures and helped me and my company do this right” and claimed that “when companies do not reach out to darker-skinned women to learn about their skin, both the companies and their customers miss out” (Garcia).
When looking at the culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, one can forecast and differentiate between future successful and unsuccessful beauty companies. Because companies like Too Faced are more open to collaboration and promote collective learning and flexible adjustment according to consumer feedback, they are more likely to succeed. As a company that encourages experimentation and entrepreneurship and “is organized to adapt continuously to fast-changing markets,” it will likely perform better by taking constructive criticisms and utilizing feedback (Saxenian 9). Although slight changes are happening, the beauty industry still largely excludes people with darker skin due to norms.
Norm and Default as White Skin: Consumer Discrimination
Occasionally, YouTube Beauty Bloggers veer out of the norm by making videos about race, complexion, and background while mocking hateful comments (Gracia). There is a norm of not discussing these issues on social media, as these bloggers are deemed too sensitive or outspoken. In addition, beauty companies also have a “beauty norm” that they concentrate on. In this case, norms are expectations that determine behaviors and long-standing societal practices that derive from preference. Beauty companies prefer justifying that whiter skin is the default in the beauty industry, leading to the practice of producing for light-skinned consumers and not producing enough dark skin products.
In reviewing “the discourse surrounding shade inclusivity,” it becomes apparent that many people perceive tone insensitivity as an unfinished matter, which had a cultural reckoning in the late 2010s, but remains unfinished today. Even the darkest shade in many beauty companies is too light for dark-skinned people. Thus, the shortcomings in shade and tone inclusivity are prevalent in the beauty industry.
This type of consumer discrimination is both a subtle and overt denial of goods and services with the lack of products. It is overt in the sense that there are no products, and subtle in the sense that the companies don’t explicitly say that they are choosing to discriminate against dark skinned consumers. For consumers, the cost of this type of discrimination that companies choose actively is that it “continues to impose both psychic and financial costs on minority consumers” (Pager 191). According to Pager, minority customers usually receive poorer service or pay than their white counterparts, which leads to chronic stress or distrust of mainstream institutions that these dark-skin beauty consumers might have (Pager 191).
Two main factors cause discrimination: intrapsychic factors, where “culturally embedded stereotypes about racial differences are reflected in both conscious and unconscious evaluations,” and organization factors where durable inequality arises because people who control access to value-producing resources solve urgent organizational problems employing categorical distinctions (Pager 194). As organizations, beauty companies who control what they produce or not are not providing enough dark-skinned products, further perpetuating discrimination whether that is consciously or unconsciously. A possible explanation for the norm of white skin in beauty companies is discrimination, particularly related to these intrapsychic factors and organizational factors.
Cultural Structures outweighs Human and Market Capital
Another explanation for this is how human capital and market capital interact with cultural structures in the beauty industry. Human capital can be defined as skills, education, and experience, while market capital includes tangible material goods related to the class background (Valdez 957). On the other hand, cultural structures are enduring systems of beliefs that are at least partially internalized, like ideas in people's heads with values. In “Effect of Social Capital on White, Korean, Mexican and Black Business Owners' Earning in the US,” Valdez demonstrates that “the ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm maintains that social capital combines with human and market capital to explain ethnic entrepreneurship” and in the market economy, ethnic minorities are particularly dependent on access to human and market capital (Valdez 969). However, although Valdez emphasizes the human and market capital for entrepreneurship, these two are not strong enough.
Many black people in the United States now have the human and market capital with the power they are willing to spend on beauty products. Although human and market capital should be able to level the playing field of opportunities and resources for people with darker skin, cultural norms and practices of the beauty industry outweigh these two factors.
This might be partly due to the legacy of historical discrimination that black people have faced in the United States from the times of slavery and the history of discrimination in the beauty industry as well. Interestingly, despite the improvements in human and market capital, social capital that fosters “group-based solidarity, trust, and reciprocal obligations” is lacking between darker-skinned beauty consumers and companies (Valdez 957). In this case, this discrimination is “discrimination in contact” rather than “discrimination in contract.” It is a form of contemporary discrimination that occurs through informal networks of opportunity that disadvantage historically excluded groups (Pager 196). Market and social capital may be helpful in entrepreneurship, but they are weak when it comes to consumer demand, resulting in a lack of trust.
Making Sure It’s Not a Trend: Earning Trust
For young people with darker skin, there is a lack of role models of darker skin. As a result, there is a lack of trust in these companies from a younger age because no products match their needs, which is disheartening.
However, companies are moving towards the idea of producing dark-skinned toned make-up. The value of dark skin products––socially constructed judgments that become inherent––is slowly increasing. Dark skin consumers and dark skin influencers will judge these products that will determine their value further. These beauty companies are “waking up and understanding that people come in every shape, size, and color and we all matter” and “industry must make inclusivity a lasting priority” (Garcia). Nevertheless, something that is very important is that this increasing value doesn’t become a trend but, rather, a norm in the beauty industry.
In The New York Times Article, Ms. Alina emphasizes that we need to be cautious about companies that exploit the idea of inclusivity or use darker women as props to show that they are inclusive (Garcia). This notion relates to how much trust the consumers and influencers can put in the company. During this stage, trust becomes more formal and steadily builds up as companies prove they are producing these products because of necessity rather than merely to increase their profits. In order to build trust (acts of cooperation with integrity and honey), companies should not make dark toned makeup available for merely a short period of time just because other companies do it, but rather, demonstrate to the consumers that they will be producing these products for a long time. If these dark-skinned consumers see these dark-skinned productions for the foreseeable future and a commitment of producing them rather than a phase, they will slowly start gaining trust.
Future Plans
There are many factors at play when it comes to exploring why beauty companies are less willing to produce dark-skinned products from norms, discrimination, cultural structures, and the lack of trust that needs to be built up. Progress has been made, but there need to be more concrete steps taken to increase inclusivity in the beauty industry. As formalized organizations, beauty companies can mitigate discrimination by limiting individual discretion (Pager 194). However, they also have the incentive to just mobilize resources to advance their interests, whether profits or continuing to adhere to the past norms (Pager 195). Consequently, diversity initiatives will be useful for these companies, including “the implementation of organizational accountability by creating new positions or task forces designed specifically to address diversity issues, managerial bias training, and mentoring and network practices” (Pager 195).
The most effective step within these processes would be to increase organizational authority and accountability, where organizational leadership is held accountable. This accountability and trust will inevitably increase when there are dark-skinned people within the beauty industry who can help in production and become the faces of beauty posters. Nonetheless, before this can be done, the first step is for the companies to admit their failures and ensure inclusivity as a top priority.
Photo: Nora Toth
Works Cited:
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