All Made Up by Rae Nudson

Author:Rae Nudson [Nudson, Rae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Outside of bleaching or brightening creams, Black women generally had to make their own products if they wanted cosmetics that catered to them. Before cosmetics could be mass-produced, many people used family recipes for skin care and cosmetics, like burned cork to darken lashes. In the early 1900s in the US, many women continued to use folk recipes, especially if they were poor or lived in rural areas. As cosmetics began to be produced on a mass-market scale, the makeup factories produced was generally for white women.

When Black folks like Anthony Overton and Madam Walker entered the beauty market and created skin-care and hair-care products, they typically had to do so by creating smaller companies than those that served white women. Beauty companies owned by Black people or that served Black women often had to sell products door-to-door or through mail-in orders because white-owned national magazines and large department stores wouldn’t run ads for or stock their products.

In the early 1900s, when cosmetic powerhouses like Max Factor, Elizabeth Arden, and Helena Rubinstein started their companies in the US, they created makeup for white skin and aimed to sell products to white customers. Arden especially prized being a part of the white upper-class society crowd, selling her products at high prices in high-end stores to get and maintain an exclusive rich white clientele. It took years for manufacturers like these to expand their shade range and to think of Black women as customers to court—if they ever came around.

But some US companies did aim to serve Black women right at the start of the modern beauty industry. Although he began by making baking powder, Overton saw that Black women didn’t have makeup to match their skin tones, so he created a powder makeup, High-Brown Face Powder—one of the first specifically made for Black women. His Overton-Hygienic Manufacturing Company became successful, inspiring other people to make shades for Black women as well, including Madam Walker, Black opera singer Anita Patti Brown with her brand Patti’s Beauty Emporium, and Hungarian American Morton Neumann with his company Valmor Products.17 However, an influx of beauty products for Black women didn’t necessarily pave the way for an acceptance of Black beauty in society.

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