Gong hei fat choy! It’s Lunar New Year, and it’s time to buy some more makeup with the money you got, and you see it; to celebrate Lunar New Year, they just put Kung Fu Panda on the packaging.
Inclusivity has been terrible lately, from shade ranges to representation, and it needs to stop.
Shade ranges need to be fixed. In brands like Essence, the shade range is just atrocious. It offers 20 shades, and 3 of them are deep. They’re also all red. In Essence, it’s expected that they wouldn’t be the best. No $6.99 foundation is going to be the best.
Youthforia’s foundation offers 15 shades, and 3 are deep. They also market it incredibly wrong. On their website, the Youthforia website, it shows it to be much darker and less red, but TikTok user @golloria shows otherwise.
In golloria’s reviews, she tests whether shade ranges are inclusive on her darker skin tone. In Youthforia’s case, it is orange and light when she puts it on, nothing like the “neutral with cool undertones” that it describes.
The Laura Mercier foundation offers 30 shades. Of those 30 shades, 7 of them are for those with deeper skin, and 17 of them are light to light medium. When inclusivity has been a problem for this long, this shouldn’t be the case.
For $48, that’s ridiculous and should not be the case. And even worse, for $52, it should match everyone’s skin tones.
Some brands can be inclusive, which is what shows it’s not impossible. The L’Oreal True Match foundation has 47 shades, and there are an equal amount of shades in each category.
Along with that, representation is even worse. Brands attempt to be inclusive by making Christmas collections, Lunar New Year collections, Hanukkah collections, and it just seems silly. Putting Po from Kung Fu Panda on the Tower28 SOS Spray isn’t inclusive, and it’s not cute. And no Nars, making the package red and gold isn’t cute either. It feels like a shallow attempt to get people to spend more.
As much as some brands do it wrong, others do it right. Brands like M.A.C. are almost there, as at least they are creative with it. They change it to red packaging with dragon scales on it.
This isn’t to say that brands can’t have simple, cost effective designs (like M.A.C. does). It’s just so irritating when brands think they can just slap a dragon on it and call it a day.
All in all, these brands really need to fix this. From shade ranges to holiday collections, beauty nowadays is simply not inclusive.
