Inclusivity, Or Just The Beauty Industry’s Latest Trend?
Written by Mae Liu
She didn’t have a name, really—but that didn’t stop me from memorizing her
appearance to a T: flowing blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, pale rosy cheeks.
Over time, she’d swap brightening powder for self-tanner, plucked arches for thick brows, lipgloss for matte liner...and so on. I kept up with bated breath, cutting her out of my favourite magazines, pasting the collage of features next to my mirror, and frowning whenever my own reflection—drastically different in every way—caught my eye.
The result? By the time I was 13, there wasn’t a single product on my shelf that didn’t promise to change something about myself. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be beautiful, of course—except as a wide-eyed Chinese teen in North America, the beauty industry always seemed to favour everything I was not.
My experience was hardly unique: growing up in a low-income, predominantly Black and Asian neighbourhood, mismatched foundation, untameable hair and awkward-fitting clothes were commonplace—as if rejecting your body and the cultures that shaped it was just another part of growing up here. There was no room for us in cosmetic aisles, commercials, or magazines, simply because corporations weren’t trying to make us feel good about ourselves. The longer they could sell an unattainable image—that perfect girl beside my mirror—the longer they kept their consumers in hot pursuit.
There was no room for us in cosmetic aisles, commercials, or magazines, simply because corporations weren’t trying to make us feel good about ourselves.
Inclusivity goes beyond a diversity hire or token POC models...it’s uplifting marginalized communities so the Western-dominated powerplay over the beauty standard can finally be dismantled.
Still, when you hear about Asian creators exploited by their sponsors during AAPI month (looking at you, Patrick Ta) or the sheer amount of girls starving themselves just to fit into Brandy Melville’s one-size designs, it’s clear we still have a long way to go.
After all, inclusivity goes beyond a diversity hire or token POC models—it’s regularly consulting them for insights and experience; it’s compensating artists and designers of colour for their work instead of appropriating without credit (see: the “fox-eye” trend, or locs and African braids sported by ignorant wearers—whitewashing the same features we’re often ostracized for). It’s uplifting marginalized communities so the Western-dominated powerplay over the beauty standard can finally be dismantled, and saturating every level of production so the industry can finally start catering to its consumers—not the other way around.
Inclusivity to me is about neutrality—celebrating the ever-expanding framework of what beauty can be. If media has the power to prescribe how we look, act, and judge others, it also has the potential to rectify generations of internalized insecurities and commodified culture. After all, as much fun as dress-up can be, we have the right to feel good in our own skin, first.