The company also score 11.5 on the Ethical Consumer rankings system, and seems like the best overall choice. The brand also offered a colour match service for BME people with ‘dark skin’ in the form of an online quiz and pigment matching products. L.A.Girl, a popular brand for Black people, had 12 face products available and 30 different shades available for the BME community, which put it in the top 10 of the brands ranked by this metric.

Estée Lauder Company (ELC): Aveda, Becca, Bobbi Brown, Clinique, Estee Lauder, Glamglow, La Mer, MAC, Origins, Smashbox, Tom Ford, Too Faced.

L’Oréal: Logona, L’Oréal, Lancôme, Maybelline, NYX, Urban Decay, Santé, YSL.

Boots: Natural Collection, No.7, Sleek, Soap and Glory, CYO.Coty: Bourjois, Burberry, Cover Girl, Rimmel, Max Factor.To answer my questions, I surveyed the websites of the 30 brands which together account for two-thirds of the UK make-up market. How many shades were available for dark-skinned people within each range?.What proportion of face ranges offered products for dark skin?.Was it easy to navigate to cosmetic ranges for dark skin?.

I had three questions for these companies and their brands:

I therefore decided to investigate make-up brands and the accessibility of their websites and range of products for people of colour.Īccording to my dark-skinned friends and family, the three go-to make-up brands for Black people in the UK are LA Girl - a US brand available in the UK, Bobbi Brown - by Estée Lauder Company (ELC) and Fenty - by LVMH.īut four companies dominate the UK make-up scene (Coty, Boots, L’Oréal and ELC) and I wanted to find out how these all compare on their approach to the BME community. This growth is obviously welcome, but, as a relatively dark-skinned Black woman, I still struggle to find shades that match my skin. More and more brands offer darker shades of foundation, but the variety of shades remains quite limited. Since the early noughties there has been a significant growth in cosmetics for non-white people available in major pharmacies and supermarkets in the UK.

Mac products for dusky skin