My Views, My Thoughts: Fenty Beauty

I'm a 19-year-old girl so you won't be surprised to know that I enjoy wearing makeup. So just like every other beauty enthusiast I was excited by Rihanna's Fenty Beauty launch. Now, Rihanna isn't the first celebrity to enter the beauty industry and won't be the last, but what made everyone go crazy was the inclusiveness of her line. 

The first launch of her beauty line included forty foundation shades! FORTY! For those of you that aren't beauty enthusiasts having 40 foundation shades in an initial launch of a line is unheard of. Most brands launch with a small selection of shades then have a relaunch at a later stage. Now, the issue with this is that the initial shades don't include darker skin tones. As a dark skin black girl this is beyond annoying, because unlike my white counterparts my affordable makeup options are extremely limited or non-existent. Do you know how hard it is walking into Boots or Superdrug, seeing hundreds of shades of ivory and not one even close to my skin tone? I'm not even being dramatic, it's emotionally draining.

Recently Nyma Tang blew up on the beauty scene with her YouTube series "The Darkest Shade" where she tries out the darkest shades of  different brands'  foundations.  She also talks about the struggle of being a dark skin black woman living in a society where the standard of beauty is white. While I'm not as dark as her, I can relate to that feeling especially as the selection of dark skin foundations is even worse in the UK. Some brands only stock their dark shades in the US and not here in the UK which is very confusing. It is one thing to say that you don't want to make dark skin tone foundations but to make it and not distribute to black people everywhere is just rude. 

Anyway, back to Fenty Beauty. What I loved most about Fenty beauty wasn't the dark shades but the really light ones. I was already aware about the struggle with dark skin tones and finding foundations that match but I never considered the other side of the spectrum. In Rihanna's collection she included shades for very light skin tones suitable for albino people to wear. As albino people don't have a lot of melanin aka pigment in their skin it can even harder for them to find completion products. It's weird how until the Fenty Beauty launch I wasn't aware of the issue as it didn't affect me. Most of the beauty and social media influencers I follow are black as I find them the most relatable so it didn't come up as an issue in any of their posts. That's what made Fenty Beauty so revolutionary, it finally showed that what beauty brands have been saying for years that you can't include all skin tones and have a good quality product was false. Rihanna did that and beauty brands have responded.

In the aftermath of the launch, the beauty brands have taken to their social media accounts and tried to prove that they're also inclusive but this was met by a backlash by social media. The brands were accused of pandering and trying to jump on the inclusivity trend when it is truly more than that, Kylie Jenner was even forced to delete on her tweets. This shows that the fight for inclusivity in beauty is not a trend, a fad or a phase but a revolution. 

And it's about bloody time.