10 Black-Owned Beauty Brands You Should Know and How They Tackle Multicultural Beauty Marketing

The world is a melting pot of race and culture. While this has been true for the longest time, multicultural beauty marketing is merely in its budding stage.

With an increasingly growing demand for more beauty innovations that resonate with minority groups and ethnicities, content marketing for beauty is becoming more aggressive in embracing diversity.

But why is this important? It’s a widely known fact that each person has contrasting needs where healthcare is concerned. Beauty innovations, like skincare and makeup, are no different. This knowledge dates back to the beginning of time, behind the science of skin color.

Unlike the ones who have fair skin tones, those who possess darker complexions have a thicker dermis layer. They’re prone to experiencing inflammation, pigment disorders, and scarring from acne. Signs of cancer are not even visible until its later stages. Simply put, They require a wholly different skincare regimen than those with lighter, fairer skin. With this, the beauty industry should champion a whole new approach.

Luckily, beauty marketing trends are rapidly changing to accommodate this need. Here are some fantastic black-owned beauty brands making waves in multicultural beauty marketing. Let’s have a look.

1. Makeup: Uoma Beauty

Pronounced as Oma (uh-mah), meaning “beautiful”, this beauty brand is founded by Nigerian-born, former beauty executive, and all-around beauty veteran Sharon Chuter. Before building her own brand, Sharon used to work for beauty industry giants for over a decade. She then took the expertise she has acquired to create Uoma Beauty.

The label takes pride in being an inclusive cosmetics line with an expansive product lineup that all women of varying skin tones and undertones are sure to favor. Its foundation line has not 10, not 20, but 51 shades.

Uoma Beauty took to social media to reach its own community and built a safe space. Here, the #UomaTribe can converse anything about beauty, share tips, and learn with each other. Browse through its Instagram feed, and you’ll see stellar makeup looks, moving messages that empower the beauty community, and gorgeous makeup products.

2. Hair Care: The Mane Choice

Realizing her passion for health and beauty, registered nurse Courtney Adeleye found The Mane Choice. The brand is all about creating healthy hair growth and retention products that promise beautifying and health-improving benefits. Since its success, the premium brand now provides customers with scientific data on haircare digitally.

The Mane Choice now boasts over 519K followers on Instagram. It utilizes this platform to educate its circle with medical-based hair care tips. It’s also the perfect channel for Courtney and her team to showcase the products, how to use them, their stunning features, and explain the science behind them without sounding like a medical textbook.

3. Makeup: Mented Cosmetics

What started as a quest for the perfect nude lipstick for their deep skin tone turned into the inspiration to create their own line. KJ Miller and Amanda E. Johnson, the power duo behind Mented Cosmetics, have now built a cult following online and in real life with their gorgeous nude lip line. They eventually ventured out into a full-blown makeup brand for women with light, tan, and dark skin tones.

Mented Cosmetics regularly hosts makeup tutorials with women of all shapes, sizes, colours, and cultures via IGTV and IG Live masterclasses. The brand does influencer marketing by engaging content creators to take over its Instagram Stories. Its blog, The Ment, provides its fan base with tons of fun tutorials.

4. Makeup: Coloured Raine

With the desire to start her own makeup brand, Coloured Raine’s founder Loraine R. Dowdy quit her job in the finance industry and jumped to the world of cosmetics. The brand believes in breaking all beauty barriers through its wide range of brightly-colored, high-quality products, which includes shades for men and women of color.

The proud team of 75+ people behind Coloured Raine is made up of 100% black employees. It is truly a brand that stands for expression.

Coloured Raine knows how to maximize the striking colors of its highly-pigmented products by doing Live IG Story tutorials with influencers. It also produces IGTV videos with both female and male beauty content creators. Coupled with Instagram, the brand has set up its YouTube channel to widen its customer reach.

5. Lip & Eye Care: KNC Beauty

After obsessing over the idea of having perfect kissable lips, KNC Beauty creator, Kristen Noel Crawley, developed her own all-natural, collagen-infused lip mask. To date, a number of Hollywood A-listers share her obsession with plump, moisturized lips. The mask also serves as a great primer for lipsticks, especially matte ones.

The cute lip masks are getting major PR coverage, thanks to Hollywood celebs who love using them. Moreover, KNC Beauty has garnered several interviews with fancy beauty digital magazine titles, helping with its brand awareness. Its cult following – including celebrity makeup artists, beauty editors, and celebs themselves – who leave fantastic reviews also assists in word-of-mouth marketing.

6. Makeup: Fenty Beauty

Superstar Rihanna trademarked her last name and created Fenty Beauty in September 2017. It first became widely known for its foundation launch, which consisted of a whopping 40 (now 50) shades.

The brand is defined by its rich diversity in pigments for all women of color. Be it foundation, concealer, blush, or bronzer; there is a shade perfect for every skin tone.

It helps that Rihanna is a megastar; hence the popularity of her brand followed pronto. With over 9 million active and highly-engaged followers on Instagram, Fenty Beauty doesn’t really have to try too hard to raise brand awareness. Rihanna utilizes content marketing to the T by having in-season IGTV makeup tutorials. She also regularly sends PR packages to beauty influencers to help her raise engagement and reach more people.

7. Hair Care: Briogeo

Thanks to her grandmother and her most coveted DIY beauty recipes, Briogeo founder Nancy Twine came up with her own natural hair care line. The idea came to life after she had tried out poor-quality store-bought products that didn’t live up to their claims.

The brand now boasts of shampoos, conditioners, hair masks, and more – all enriched with vitamins, oils and, antioxidants – that cater to all hair types.

Its blog, B-Spoke, offers rich resources about hair care and styling. The brand utilizes video marketing, with its beautifully-edited YouTube promotional and how-to videos, and IGTV tutorials with the #BriogeoBabes. They understand that an aesthetically-pleasing curated Instagram feed will lead to organic growth and excellent engagement between the brand and its followers.

8. Skin Care: Black Girl Sunscreen

It should come as no surprise that women of color get sunburn too. While those with more melanin are better safeguarded from the sun’s harmful effects, they are not fully protected against all types of UV rays. Shontay Lundy, the brand’s founder and an outdoor lover, knew this all too well, and thus, Black Girl Sunscreen was born.

This brand is living and breathing multicultural beauty marketing. Its Instagram feed features empowerment messages and images of beautiful black women with varying skin shades. It also serves as an educational tool to teach the importance of wearing sunscreen for people of color.

9. Makeup: Beauty Bakerie

For high-quality cosmetics that are as sweet as they look and sound, look no further than Cashmere Nicole’s brainchild, Beauty Bakerie. Well-loved for its playful and confection-themed designs, the brand’s popularity skyrocketed thanks to a video demonstrating their liquid lipsticks’ miraculous staying power.

Their wide range of makeup has everything you could ever need. But the best part? They’re all smudge-proof, paraben-free, cruelty-free, and vegan.

Staying true to video content, the Beauty Bakerie is not only winning on Instagram with over 1 million active followers but on YouTube as well with more than 29K subscribers. It makes use of IGTV makeup tutorials to showcase products and commission black beauty influencers to create content for them. The team also puts up events in real life so customers can try out the products physically.

10. Skin, Body, & Hair Care: Beneath Your Mask

Beneath Your Mask is a byproduct of Dana Jackson’s tumultuous journey to self-healing and self-discovery. The luxury brand is a collection of beauty care products designed to restore, repair, and reverse damaging effects from stress, health, and environmental hazards.

Their formulas are sourced from clean, active ingredients that are guaranteed to pamper women who wish to look and feel good.

BYM has its own blog where its team consistently produces posts with smartly-curated keywords. The brand has also been picked up by major media titles like Vogue, Elle, and The Zoe Report. It has even won a beauty award from Allure last year, proving that multicultural beauty marketing isn’t limited to social media alone.

To wrap it up

With changes taking place in beauty marketing trends, there’s indeed a ton of ways to do content marketing for beauty brands. For starters, there are social media, blogs, and influencer marketing.

Thanks to expertly-curated videos and images, beautiful brand storytelling, and engaging copy, every brand can widen its community, and raise awareness in a usually crowded market space.

If done right, you can even support the right causes, and fight for equality through your branded beauty content.

Header Image Source: Photo by Bash Mutumba from Pexels