Beauty Influencer Jackie Aina Called Out The Lack of Nude Makeup for Dark-Skinned Women
For Black girls and other dark-skinned women of color, finding our own versions of “nude” can be a struggle. Until recently, Nude lipstick has typically been marketed to consumers with fair to light, and sometimes medium, skin. I remember my own personal struggle with finding a nude lipstick at the MAC counter during the time where women everywhere were trying to achieve the “nude glam” look popularized by the Kardashians. Regardless of the number of lipstick shades available in the MAC range, the makeup artist still couldn’t really find my match. I ended up settling on a peachy nude color called “Jubilee.” Jubilee was definitely not a nude match for my brown skin. The formula was nice, but it was pasty of a shade to come off as nude on my lips and definitely needed to be altered with something darker. I needed something with a warmer tone, but I was so determined to make it work that I settled with the color, and gave up on my search.
Beauty influencer Jackie Aina knows this story all too well. In her most recent video, Aina dedicated an entire discussion to the singular concept of nude makeup and demonstrated, with a variety of swatches, how exclusionary it really is. We like to think of makeup as “one size fits all,” but there are still areas where brands aren’t considering the needs of their consumers with darker skin. “In theory, nude is supposed to be for everyone, right?” she says. Aina mentions that there’s nothing wrong with a company that brands their products as nude, “But just be mindful of how that imagery plays into people’s psyche in the long run. Every time I see an image of nude, it’s always beige, or peach, or a really light color, then you’re kind of saying that’s the default,” she says. This struggle isn’t exclusive to beauty, it even extends to undergarments, trying to match nude colored bras, underwear, and shape wear to the colors of our dark skin.
With a quick google search, Aina shoes that beige shades are the default representation of nude across many brands. She continues to swatch different lipsticks and keeps coming back to the same sentiment: “this is a really good color...not without a liner though!” Using a dark brown lip liner is a technique that women of color have to learn to add depth to any standard nude lipstick so that it doesn’t look pasty on the lips.
We’ve recently seen brands stepping up to expand their range of complexion products to match a larger spectrum of skin tones. Fenty Beauty, Cover FX, and NYX Cosmetics are great examples, but shade inclusion doesn’t stop at complexion. It’s vital that beauty brands represent all of their consumers across all cosmetic products. Jackie said it best, “The standard is not the standard anymore.”
Keep scrolling to see some of Jackie Aina's favorite nude lipsticks and some of ours too:
