INCLUSIVITY
A how-to guide for personal care inclusivity
Eleanor Pomroy, Emer Mackle - Lake Personal Care
Inclusivity is defined by Merriam-Webster as ‘the quality or state of being inclusive’. Inclusive Beauty addresses the personal care needs of all individuals, regardless of their gender, age, and race.1 For the personal care industry, inclusivity will
have significant impact, with consumers seeking out brands that can nourish their renewed focus on living unapologetically. For brands, getting inclusivity right is complicated, but vital. Overall, 56% of consumers think that the beauty and personal care industry can make people feel excluded.2 CB Insights has reported that news articles
mentioning keywords such as ‘beauty’ and ‘inclusive’ or ‘inclusivity’ or ‘diversity’ spiked in June 2020 and have since remained at a high level.3
In addition, social media reports
on the most popular brands in terms of impressions, sentiment and engagement, show that inclusivity is becoming increasingly more important in the online sphere. The top two beauty brands in 2021, as
identified by NetBase Quid, were Fenty Beauty and NYX. Fenty is famous for its immediate inclusivity when launching in 2017 with the vastly diverse ‘Fenty 40’ foundation shade range, followed by the release of its genderless skin care products in 2020. Fenty actively encourages race and gender
inclusivity, advertising products online with ambassadors from multiple race and gender groups. NYX, in a similar vein, recently launched their ‘Proudly Pro-You’ Campaign, created to ‘drive concrete change and reflect their ongoing commitment to support, represent and celebrate the talents of LGBTQIA+ people of colour’. Stylus classed this trend as ‘Empowering
Every Body’ and highlighted that businesses across industries will enable the path to purchase for products that are designed with inclusivity in mind. One such brand example they noted was the ecommerce site The Phluid Project, that partners solely with brands whose products ‘celebrate the non-binary’.4 The consumer demand for inclusivity has not
only influenced the so-called ‘indie brands’. In 2020, Unilever renamed its Fair & Lovely cream after significant backlash, and L’Oréal removed words such as ‘whitening’, ‘fairness’ and ‘lightening’ from items sold by the company. The Procter & Gamble brand, Good Skin MD, was also launched with a gender-neutral focus, with the tagline ‘because all skin can be happy skin’.
www.personalcaremagazine.com
Ethnicity A significant part of inclusivity is catering for various ethnicities in the product design and messaging, which has become a key focus for brands over the last few years. The UK, for example, is an increasingly diverse nation, with Census reports illustrating that the percentage of the population that come from a white background has decreased from 92.1% in 2001, to 87% in 2011.5
This is set to have decreased further
with the release of the 2021 Census data. There have also been multiple events that
have highlighted the lack of inclusivity that society still faces, including the founding of Black Lives Matter in 2013, and multiple instances of racially-driven violence, which has led to global searches for ‘societal racism’ on Google increasing by 1500% in the last few years.6 More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has
served to highlight the under-representation of minority ethnic groups in UK medical research. Many publications have referenced the lack of knowledge in the NHS (National Health Service) regarding cyanosis, a symptom that was a key indicator for a patient to attend A&E when suffering with Covid-19. For those with lighter skin tones, cyanosis
presents as a blue colour, particularly on lips, skin, and under the nails. However, on those
with darker skin tones, cyanosis presents as a general ‘ashiness’ of the skin. It was widely reported that those working on the 111 non- emergency number NHS medical helpline were not aware of this, and this difference in presentation is not, at the time of writing, listed anywhere on the NHS website, where the public are directed to check symptoms.7 2020 also saw the publication of ‘Mind
The Gap: A Handbook of Clinical Signs in Black and Brown Skin’, by Malone Mukwende, Peter Tamony and Margot Turner.8,9
Mukwende,
the originator of the idea for the handbook, generated the project to combat the issues he faced while studying at St. George’s, University of London. He noted that the majority of study materials and textbooks focussed largely on white patients, and that he and his cohort were not being taught how to recognise signs and symptoms of medical disorders on black and brown skin. Working with Tamony and Turner, lecturers
at St George’s, the Handbook was created, which includes pictures and clinical descriptors of black and brown skin. The book is now recommended reading for doctors and medical students, and a website has since been launched to allow others to contribute to building a database.9
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