In 2017, Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty with 40 foundation shades. The beauty industry called it revolutionary, Black women called it overdue.
For decades, mainstream beauty brands had profited from Black purchasing power while offering foundation shades that stopped at the edge of whiteness, hair care products that ignored Black textures, and marketing campaigns that centered white beauty as the default standard.
Black women were the industry’s most loyal consumers and its most ignored constituency simultaneously, then Fenty Beauty happened.
Within weeks of its launch, every major beauty brand scrambled to expand their shade ranges. Not because they had suddenly discovered that Black women existed; but because Fenty Beauty proved, with receipts, that Black women’s beauty needs represented an enormous, underserved market that the industry had been ignoring for profit.
Now in 2026, the evolution of Black beauty is in full effect. Pat McGrath Labs and Danessa Myricks Beauty are pushing artistry and complexion innovation forward with high performance formulas that melt into melanin instead of sitting on top of it. LYS Beauty, created by Tisha Thompson, is proving that clean beauty can be truly inclusive. Black women aren’t just changing the beauty industry. They are the beauty industry.
Danessa Myricks ditched corporate life to launch her beauty line in 2015, building a cult brand that professional makeup artists discovered through word-of-mouth praise, achieving viral accolades on TikTok and $30M+ in annual sales. Janell Stephens launched Camille Rose in 2010 in her own kitchen and grew it into a self-funded, multi-million dollar empire distributed at major retailers across the country.
These women did not wait for the industry to include them, they built the infrastructure that made inclusion impossible to ignore. But here is the structural argument this week demands we name. Support for Black-owned beauty brands spikes around calendar moments: Black History Month, social justice movements, heightened awareness, only to quietly fade. This cyclical attention reduces complex entrepreneurship to trending topics.
In a climate where DEI rollbacks from mainstream companies have forced support for Black businesses to the margins, one Black-owned beauty brand shuttered in 2025. This is the same structure this week’s IMPACT content has been documenting in every industry. Black women build, the industry extracts, and the language of inclusion arrives when it becomes profitable and retreats when it becomes inconvenient.
Fawn Weaver built Uncle Nearest from buried history. The infrastructure she created was taken from her while the man who defrauded it walks free.
Roz Brewer was handed a burning company. When the fire proved too large, she was removed and the industry framed her exit as her failure.
The Black beauty founders who built the industry’s most innovative brands are watching DEI rollbacks push support for Black businesses back to the margins while mainstream brands that scrambled to expand their shade ranges in 2017 quietly narrow their commitments in 2026.
As Black beauty continues to gain traction and profitability, many brands are jumping on the representation bandwagon without putting in the real work. Cultural appreciation quickly turns into appropriation when a brand takes from Black culture without any real investment in the Black community. Representation is not just about casting decisions. It is about ownership, leadership, and profit-sharing with the community.
Black women are not a trend, black beauty is not a moment, and the industry that profits most from Black innovation owes more than a shade range expansion when the cameras are watching.
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