Three women making their mark on the beauty market

Marcia Kilgore: 'Instead of luxury labels, what people want to portray is their own brand'

Marcia Kilgore was watching telly when she had the idea. "I thought, what about Netflix but for beauty – so everyone could get a bigger piece of the beauty pie?" The woman behind Bliss Spas, FitFlops and Soap & Glory, Kilgore has long been renowned for "disrupting" the industry, but this project threatened to go even further, toppling it on its side, skidding into a hedge.

I'd heard a rumour that Kilgore's new venture was such a threat to established beauty brands that she'd received death threats. She chuckles. "There's room for us and for them. After all, Netflix exists, but people still go to the cinema, right?"

This is how Beauty Pie works: you pay £10 a month for membership, and then you can purchase its carefully curated collection of make-up and skincare at factory prices. So, that's £20 lipsticks for £2.24, excellent foundation (in Armani-esque bottles) for £4.75, and the new "Super-Eye Energy Peptide Infusion Cream" for £5.65. The pricing is totally transparent, and the products are comparable to those in the fanciest beauty halls.

As Beauty Pie nears its first anniversary, now with tens of thousands of members, Kilgore says the key to its success lies in the "personal brand". Rather than define themselves through designer labels, she says: "What people really want to portray is their own brand."

Only a fraction of the cost of a luxury product is the product itself. The rest is what Kilgore calls LMAO, or "Landfill Marketing and Overheads." Kilgore spends days at cosmetics factories: one will produce a perfect lipstick, at another she knows a product mixer who specialises in foundation. "You become quite elitist in terms of the quality. If something doesn't have good colour payoff or the pencil is a bit too dry, I reject them."

Of the luxury brands, she says, her voice dropping a little, 95% buy the same products she does, tweaking the colours slightly, whacking it in their own packaging and adding a few zeroes to the price – often 30 times the price it costs to make. "We had this skin brush from Korea, a rechargeable one in soft-touch rubber, for £18," Kilgore says. "In shops it would be more than £80. I've seen things like it in the airport for £300." Is there a company she finds particularly disingenuous? She puts her hand over the tape recorder and mouths the name of a brand whose moisturisers sell for £200, and whose formulations can be found for a 10th of that through Beauty Pie.

Ozohu Adoh: 'The luxury market was not meeting the needs of women of colour'

This year Ozohu Adoh, a Nigerian-born ex-accountant, launched Epara, the first luxury beauty brand specifically targeting women of colour. The line has already been bought by Harrods, which knows its audience: in 2015, says Adoh, every £1 in £3 spent in the store was by a Nigerian.

It began by accident. "I had excessive dry skin on my face. I tried all the luxury skincare brands and they just didn't work." She researched ingredients, making her own concoctions using mainly oils. "It took several iterations before I got something that worked," says Adoh. When her skin cleared up "friends started to ask me for this thing in a nondescript jar." That was three years ago. She has since developed a line including cleansers, a mask, serums and eye cream. Many of her ingredients, such as marula and moringa oils, and mango butter, are found on African soil. "I want to take them mainstream," she says.

Some have asked why women of colour need their own skincare line. "The market was not addressing our needs," says Adoh. "Due to higher levels of melanin, typical problems present differently in darker skin tones. Uneven skin tone caused by hormonal issues or acne scarring can take much longer to heal."

Tricia Cusden: 'Society hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that we're living longer'

"The beauty industry assumes we are all engaged in an anti-ageing battle," says an emphatic Tricia Cusden, the 70-year-old founder of mature make-up brand Look Fabulous Forever. "I am determined to change this."

Cusden, a former management consultant from south London, has a "pro-ageing" attitude to beauty. She launched Look Fabulous Forever in 2013, "after wasting £50 on products meant for skin a lot younger than mine" and becoming "increasingly exercised" by the "insulting" rhetoric around older women and their beauty routine. Cusden's mission was two-fold: create products and imagery that were "honest, featuring women over the age of 55"; and to use "positive language, to represent ageing as something to embrace, not to fight against"...

The battle to end the world's obsession with lighter skin

"It starts when children are young: the moment a child is born, relatives start comparing siblings' skin colour. It starts in your own family – but people don't want to talk about it openly."

Kavitha Emmanuel is the founder of Women of Worth, an Indian NGO that is standing up to bias toward lighter skin. The Dark Is Beautiful campaign, launched in 2009, is not "anti-white", she says, but about inclusivity – beauty beyond colour. It carries celebrity endorsement, most notably from the Bollywood actor Nandita Das, and provides a forum for people to share their personal stories of skin colour bias.

The campaign runs media literacy workshops and advocacy programmes in schools to counteract colour bias. Emmanuel says this even occurs in school textbooks, where a picture of a fair-skinned girl might be labelled "beautiful" and a darker one "ugly".

"Some children are really shocked that this affects them so intensely," Emmanuel says. "Some are in tears [during the workshops]."

A perfect life from perfect skin – but only for those of the right shade – is the message and mindset that's being passed down. This has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in cosmetic creams and invasive procedures such as skin bleaching, chemical peels, laser treatments, steroid cocktails, "whitening" pills and intravenous injections – all with varying effectiveness and health risks. It's more than a bias, it's a dangerous cultural obsession.

Multinational cosmetics brands have found a lucrative market: global spending on skin lightening is projected to triple to $31.2bn (£24bn) by 2024, according to a report released in June 2017 by the research firm Global Industry Analysts. The driving force, it says, is "the still rampant darker skin stigma, and rigid cultural perception that correlates lighter skin tone with beauty and personal success".

"This is not bias. This is racism," says Sunil Bhatia, a professor of human development at Connecticut College. Bhatia recently wrote in US News & World Report about deep-rooted internalised racism and social hierarchies based on skin colour.

In India, these were codified in the caste system, the ancient Hindu classification in which birth determined occupation and social stratum. At the top, Brahmins were priests and intellectuals; at the bottom, outcastes were confined to the least-desired jobs such as latrine cleaners. Bhatia says caste may have been about more than just occupation: the darker you looked, the lower your place in the social hierarchy.

Fair skin bias was perpetuated and strongly reinforced by colonialism, not just in India but in dozens of countries ruled by a European power. It's the idea that the ruler is fair-skinned, says Emmanuel: "All around the world, it was a fact that the rich could stay indoors versus the poor who worked outside and were dark-skinned."

Now globalisation is spreading the bias. "There is an interesting whiteness travelling from the US to shopping malls in other countries, featuring white models," Bhatia says. "You can trace a line from colonialism, post-colonialism and globalisation."

Western beauty ideals, including fair skin, dominate worldwide. And with these ideals come products to service them. In Nigeria, 77% of the country's women use skin-lightening agents; in Togo, 59%. But the largest and fastest-growing markets are in the Asia-Pacific region. In India, a typical supermarket will have a wall of personal care products featuring "whitening" moisturiser or "lightening" body creams from wellknown brands.

How to do the perfect winged eyeliner

We all have good eyeliner days and bad eyeliner days; times where made-up eyes do not even look like friends, let alone sisters. But for me, it's worth experimenting to find a swoosh that suits your eye shape, – and one that you can replicate symmetrically – because there's nothing like winged liner to complete a look. Practice makes perfect. Here's how I do mine – using the best liner I've found, the Marc Jacobs Magic Marc'er liquid eyeliner pen in Blacquer. I find pen eyeliners a little easier to contol than brushes, so if you are new to winged eyeliner, this magic Marc'er might just become your new best friend.

Step 1

I begin with simple eyeshadow as a base to complement the eyeliner. I love improvising with makeup, so I often use a blusher palette as eyeshadow. Sleek Blush By 3 palette in Flame works wonders for this; it has just as much pigment as a standard eyeshadow palette. After that, I sketch out the liner by drawing a short line from the outer corner of the eye, as though following the curve of the lower lash line.

Step 2

Draw a line all the way across the upper eyelid, from the tear duct to the outer edge of the lower line. It helps if you pull the eye from the corner a little, to flatten the skin, so the liner goes on smoothly.

Step 3

Fill in the gaps between the outer point of the liner and the lash line, ensuring that you don't leave any empty spaces.

Step 4

Add the final finishing touches to your look. I love a good highlight on my tear duct and brow bone, so I've used the Sleek highlight palette in Cleopatra's Kiss. Feel free to customise your eyeliner any way you like; don't be afraid to take the line thicker, or to make it thinner, to suit your eye shape. I've finished the look with a pair of my current favourite lashes by Huda Beauty in the Noelle style ; I love their Samantha style, too, which gives a pretty, wispy effect.

How to make your skin glow

There are many sad things about coming back from holidays. For one, it's the beginning of the end for that glowy skin you only get after about a week away from your desk and in the fresh air. But with a little prep and a bit of shimmer, you can fake that dewy look all year. Here is how I do it.

Step one

Prepping your skin is the most essential part of this process. I use exfoliators and pore-cleansing masks as part of my regular routine, which helps other products sink into my skin easily. My favourite is NSPA's glow mud mask. I also use a combination smoothing lightweight emulsion moisturiser, which adds loads of dewiness but has a lightweight texture that feels comfortable on the skin.

Step two

Apply a liquid illuminator all over your face as a base. I like the Buxom Cosmetics liquid highlighter in Divine Goddess for a really subtle "wet skin" glow.

Step three

I use a Real Techniques sponge to blend my foundation properly without leaving too much excess on my face. My favourite for a natural dewy look is the Bare Minerals bare skin foundation in the colour Walnut.

Step four

I use concealer under my eyes, down my nose, and on the centre of my chin, which brightens the places the sunlight naturally hits my face. Decide where to put your concealer depending on your face shape. I use Too Faced born this way concealer in Medium tan, which stays dewy even when it has been set with powder. I use pressed transluscent powder, rather than loose, such as Inglot Cosmetics HD pressed powder in shade 404.

Step five

For extra glow I add a light contour to my cheeks using the Buxom Cosmetics hot escapes bronzer in the shade Maldives. To bring back warmth to my skin, I add a touch of blusher, then complete by dusting a shimmery golden highlight on the highest point of my cheekbone, and the tip of my nose. Focus this shimmery highlight on the areas you want to enhance and bring forward. I love to use the Nip+Fab travel palette in Medium/Dark 2 which has the contour, blush and highlight in one.

Step six

Finally, add a little bit of a shimmery lip gloss to compliment your dewy skin. I am using the Buxom cosmetics lip polish in Sugar on top of my Nip+Fab lip liner in Espresso.