Golloria George was a middle schooler when she knew there was a problem with makeup shade availability.
“There was always just one brown shade but there would be like 20 light shades,” George, now 23, tells TODAY.com in an interview.
“There was just never any shades and if there were shades, it wasn’t even reaching the deep, dark category. There was just no way that it would even work for me,” she continues.
The scarcity problem became even more clear, she says, when she spent time with her friends in college at Texas State, near her hometown of Austin.
“I’m trying to experience college and I see all my friends doing makeup and they’re always getting ready together. And I’m just like, ‘Girl, I wish I could,'” she recalls.
To vent and to feel less “alone,” George created a TikTok account in January 2022 to review products, chronicle her experiences with finding makeup matches and find the community she knew was out there experiencing the same issue.
Since then, a community of 1.6 million followers has replaced her lonely shopping experience.
Makeup brands have been under fire in recent years for carrying limited foundation shade ranges, lacking in the darkest shades. George has been one of the leading beauty influencers in pressuring companies to expand their selections to be more inclusive. In her videos, she tests brands’ shade offerings to see how they measure up.
“Making these videos is truly just like shedding light on the fact that there is still work to be done,” she says. “Having tone inclusiveness should be the absolute bare minimum.”
‘What’s going on in this beauty industry?’
As George has grown in popularity online, other Black women have responded to her videos to say thank you and to share their experiences.
“These experiences are very, very real, not only because I experienced them myself, but now I have hundreds of thousands of other dark-skinned women saying that they’re also still having these issues,” she says.
“I’ve been able to really build a community and I’ve also been able to just not feel as alone in this, especially as I once did, to know that there are also other people and other dark skinned people and girls like, ‘Girl, what’s going on in this beauty industry,’ feeling the exact same way,” she adds.
Their personal experiences support data on the subject. In a 2022 report issued by McKinsey about Black representation in the beauty industry, only 13% of Black survey respondents said it’s easy to find beauty products that meet their needs in mass-market retailers or grocery stores where they most commonly shop.
After buying products, they usually “don’t work as consumers hoped they would,” the report said. Black consumers reported dissatisfaction due to failures to meet racial or ethnic needs at a rate of 5.7 times more than white consumers, the report found.
A key barrier is that there are not many usable products for them and stores are located further away from Black consumers with available inventory that can be hit or miss, the report said.
George echoes the report’s findings, saying her frustrating experiences with shopping for makeup, and discrepancies at large, are reflective of most beauty brands not considering dark-skinned women.
“It’s not that they don’t know we exist. It’s just simply that we are just not a thought to them,” she says of makeup brands with limited shades.
The disconnect is particularly confusing, George says, given the financial gain companies would experience if they included darker swatches. Black consumers spent $9.4 billion on beauty products with dollar, unit and household growth in 2023, making up 12.5% of total U.S. beauty spending, according to a 2024 Nielsen report. The U.S. cosmetics market is estimated to be $93.7 billion in 2024, according to a report by Modor intelligence.
What is an inclusive makeup company?
George says inclusive makeup brands are comprehensive in their offerings and launch the company or line with the full set of shades available. The accompanying advertisements also show how different colors would show up on various skin tones.
“I would define tone inclusivity as creating shades for everybody,” she says. “The lightest end of the spectrum and the darkest end of the spectrum as well, and making sure that that inclusivity and the range carries throughout all of your products, not just a foundation. Every product should be inclusive.”
A makeup line usually includes foundation, concealer, highlighter, blush, eye shadow, eye liner and mascara.
George says Fenty by Rihanna, WYN Beauty by Serena Williams and Made by Mitchell are among the companies that have surpassed her litmus test for inclusivity and set the bar for the industry.
Fenty in particular made waves in the industry when it launched in 2017 with 40 foundation shades and 91 different products, partner LVMH said in a press release at the time.
“It was also important that every woman felt included in this brand. We are all so different, with our own unique skin tones, so we started with the 40 foundation shades out the gate,” Rihanna told TIME when the brand launched.
On her TikTok, George has critiqued other companies for their lack of shades or inappropriate colors. She, along with other influencers, previously picked apart Youthforia’s darkest swatch at the time to the point that the company later added a new, deeper color offering. George then criticized the new offering as “tar in a bottle.”
The Shark Tank-backed company offered 15 shades in April of 2023. That October, George swatched the darkest shade available at the time on herself and it appear several shades too light in her now-viral video. She called for Youthforia to carry more shades for darker tones.
Youthforia founder Fiona Co Chan said in a now-deleted initial response at the time that it was a limited launch as “proof of concept” that the product would succeed, NBC News reported.
The makeup line expanded to 25 shades as of March 2, offering Shade 600, which was created using a single color: black iron oxide, according to the ingredients stated on the product listing. This shade was “minstrel show Black,” George said in her viral video reviewing it.
Youthforia did not respond to TODAY.com’s request for comment in March.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes when I make these videos for these brands. I understand that being told by the masses that your shade range is not inclusive is hard to hear,” she sats. “But also imagine being the consumer and walking into a store and wanting to try a shade range from a brand and them not even catering to your skin color.”
George says companies have contacted her to apologize and share what they’re doing to improve.
“It’s always nice to hear that there’s something happening in the background, like this isn’t the final destination,” she says. “But also … why are we still an afterthought? But you take your wins where you can get them. Inclusivity is not super fast paced. It’s not going to happen quickly. So I think patience also goes a long way here.”
She added that hiring Black creators to consult on shades would help. The McKinsey report, when listing recommendations for beauty brands, said increasing racial makeups of staff to 15% Black at all levels of the company will lead to better products and more sales. The report also called for a commitment to invest in and help grow at least 500 Black beauty brands.
‘A complete full circle moment’
George’s TikTok began as a response to the makeup issues she experienced in middle school and college. It turned out to be the very thing that has opened professional doors.
As an aspiring model, her makeup page taking off has only helped her budding career, particularly as she lands partnership deals with brands.
When Fenty invited her to their Los Angeles product launch event for Soft’lit Naturally Luminous Longwear Foundation on April 26, she met Rihanna and interviewed her on the red carpet.
The significance of receiving an invite is not lost on her.
“Fenty Beauty really did this. One of the first viral videos that gave me any footing in the beauty industry was trying the Fenty matchstick and the color caviar,” she says. “So being in front of (Rihanna) was a complete full circle moment for me because I never thought that I could even be in this space.”
George says Rihanna complimented her “most beautiful skin.”
“I felt so loved,” she says. “She genuinely saw us and she sees us.”
Coming from the music world, Rihanna wasn’t known for her experience in the makeup industry. George feels her company has thrived because she was inclusive from the start.
Rihanna told Essence in 2020, “I wanted everyone to feel included. We actually started with foundation because it’s the very first makeup product I fell in love with.”
Rihanna “changed the state” of the industry with her “inclusivity strategy,” British Vogue reported in 2020.
“She was like, ‘I’m gonna do this and I’m going to create this beauty brand,'” she says. “I’m gonna do it right and I’m gonna make sure that everyone is included.”
“And it goes to show that you don’t have to have complete knowledge of makeup to make shades for darker complexions,” George adds. “You just have to have enough humanity. You just have to see us as humans to be like, ‘Hey, I’m going to make shades for them.'”
