“The first time we showed the Fenty Beauty campaign trailer internally, a room full of business leaders, including myself, got very emotional,” reveals Sandy Saputo, chief marketing officer of Kendo Brands which plays host to pop star Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty. In a market study by Think with Google, she added, “It was the first time underrepresented, underserved women and cultures were featured in a global prestige beauty campaign. We had to break and disrupt all the traditional marketing rules and carve a new path.”
To understand the true impact of Fenty Beauty’s radical approach to inclusivity, it is necessary to consider it against the larger backdrop of the beauty landscape. For decades, billboards and campaigns had been peddling an unattainable standard of what beauty should look like—skin that glowed with the luminosity of a thousand suns, voluminous hair that radiated with vitality and the perfect glossy smile, all tied together with an unfathomable lacquer of perfection, courtesy the nifty fingers of a Photoshop artist. Meanwhile, on home shores, fairness products promised to place everything from professional success to personal fulfilment within your reach if you chose the right skin-whitening cream. The point was driven unflinchingly home with arbitrary shade measurement cards affixed to the product packaging, bringing back unsavoury memories of the discriminatory brown paper bag test from the pages of history.
To say that the beauty industry was long overdue for an overhaul would be an understatement, and to assume that a convenient name change to ‘Glow and Lovely’ could dial back the clock on decades of colourism would be another one. We spoke to founders of beauty brands in India as well as industry insiders on the work they have been putting in to make the industry truly inclusive, and here’s what we learned.