The new beauty

Why Rihanna’s makeup line represents a whole lot more than a mere tube of lipstick Sadaf Ahsan

before the line was released, Insecure writer and actress Issa Rae was announced as the new face of Covergirl, making her one of the brand’s few dark-skinned models. In an Instagram post announcing the sponsorship, she wrote, “I remember being an awkward black girl in high school, reading the pages of my favourite magazines, casually flipping through @COVERGIRL ads, singing their slogan in my head. Never EVER in my life did I imagine I’d be one.”

It’s a poignant statement, because up until this confluence of racially diverse campaigns, women of colour have been largely left out as key spokeswomen of beauty products and, therefore, what has come to be considered beautiful. It’s unlikely epiphany-prompting to suggest that we have traditionally defined beauty by the physical standards promoted by magazine covers, movies, television and even Barbie dolls. But it might be insightful to consider the dominant traits of those we’ve considered beautiful. We’ve gone from model Twiggy defining the ’60s, to Lauren Hutton in the ’70s, to Elle Macpherson in the ’80s, to Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington at the epicentre of the ’90s, to Gisele Bundchen in the ’00s, and now we have Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner. Aside from the iconic faces of Iman, Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks and Alek Wek, for the most part, every inch of what we see in female beauty has been white.

If the evidence is found in the glossy pages of fashion magazines, the implementation of these beauty standards has long been manifested onscreen in movies and television. In a recent Vox story, reporter Estelle Caswell spelled it out simply when she wrote, “Colour film was built for white people.”

Caswell was referring to early colour film, when the chemicals coating the film couldn’t properly capture skin tones other than white because photo labs hadn’t bothered to consider why photographing a person of any other skin stand how to light different people. That’s why, even today, you’ll still see a movie or a TV show in which the actors of colour are not lit in quite the same manner as their white co-stars. In 2017, properly lighting shots for a variety of skin tones remains a challenge because the standards of the previous generation are passed down to the next without consideration. When photographers learn how to light a shot, they are typically learning how to light a shot for people with light skin, regardless of what their subjects actually look like. It’s another reason why casts and crews that feature more diversity, shows like Insecure and Black-ish, are so important. Yes, there is the benefit of increased representation, but there are technical innovations happening and new standards of lighting being created.

A technological bias is unlikely to ever fix itself; it takes the artists, technicians and chemists to think forward. Beauty is a spectrum; it used to be defined by what we saw on TV and spilled over into what we saw on store shelves. Now, that might be working in reverse.

Rihanna referred to her makeup line as representing “the new generation of beauty.” While Fenty Beauty isn’t the first to offer a wide range of shades, it is the first to receive the spotlight such inclusivity deserves, because the rest of the world is finally listening, following suit and validating a diverse market.

Just as giving diversity a chance is about more than identity politics, so too is offering something as simple as more makeup shades. The beauty world is acknowledging what has traditionally been lacking, giving it legitimacy and recognition, but Fenty Beauty is also taking that opportunity to speak to a wider demographic than any line before it.

While a tube of lipstick might seem frivolous to one person, it’s anything but to an entire generation of women growing up right now.