How U.K. High Street Makeup Brands Are Finally Catering For Dark Skin Customers

Maybelline is now extending their line of foundations for women with darker skin on its best selling ranges. Photographer Nadia Gomos played a key role in pushing the brand to consider their black and Asian customers.
During weekends when she was younger, Nadia Gomos and her friends would go to all the high street beauty stores, however she knew there was always one item she could never test out – foundation. This was always because all the options available were catered for people with lighter skin.

“I would go shopping on a Saturday with my friends and they would be testing out the different shades of foundation, but I would just go and look at something else in the shop because there were no shades for people with darker skin tones,” she said in an interview.

That was 10 years ago, and still, not much has changed. However Gomos, has encouraged Maybelline into making a positive change for women of color in Britain, by bringing out more shades.

The makeup brand, which describes themselves as one of the world’s leading cosmetic brands, recently announced that they are increasing the number of shades across three of its main franchises of foundation ranges.

The Fit Me Matte & Poreless foundation has gone from 8 to 20 shades. Dream Satin Liquid has doubled to 22 shades, and Superstay Foundation has gone from 8 to 11 shades.

This time last year, Maybelline launched 12 different shades for their Dream Velvet foundation line. Gomos heard about the new range and couldn’t wait to try it out. However, she noticed that only six of the lightest shades were available to purchase, and was the same across the country. None of the darker shades were available to purchase in the U.K., only in the U.S. Gomos wrote a blog post about her experience of global makeup brands ignoring their customers with darker skin tones in the U.K. In her blog post, she included how ironic it was that Maybelline used black British model, Jourdan Dunn to advertise a produce she would not even be able to buy in the country she lived in.

After BuzzFeed News contacted the company, they agreed to release Dunn’s shade in the U.K. It was a step in the right direction, but one shade was not good enough. It is an experience that women of color are familiar with, feeling ignored.

And a year later, Maybelline have in fact recognized the problem and has since, introduced many different shades for their foundation lines. Hopefully more makeup companies will do the same in 2017 and beyond.