The [black] [woman] Internet is all a’buzz over the new Carol’s Daughter ad campaign “Beauty In Diversity”:

“Amidst of working on new albums, singers Solange Knowles and Cassie team up with Victoria’s Secret model, Selita Ebanks to become the faces of the new Carol’s Daughter multiracial campaign. The beauties can be seen gracing the cover of WWD Style magazine above the caption: Beauty in Diversity.

Lisa Price, founder of the revolutionary hair and skin care line, designed the new campaign ad to reflect the recent demographic shift reported by the U.S. Census. The nationalities of each of the new Carol’s Daughter spokeswomen – Cassie (African American, Mexican and Filipina), Selita (Native American, Irish and African-American), and Solange (African American and French Creole) – directly parallel Census figures showing at least 9 million people who identify themselves as bi- or multi-racial.

Ebanks says, “Carol’s Daughter doesn’t have just one direct demographic. Solange’s hair is a different texture than mine; so is Cassie’s. Our skin and body types are different. Today, people are blended, and I think the three of us are a prime example. Women in my family range from vanilla to the deepest chocolate.”

Steve Stoute, lead investor and chairman of Carol’s Daughter, says the brand is simply mirroring the new diverse America,“What we’re doing now is moving into a polyethnic space. We want to be the first beauty brand that truly captures the beauty of the tapestry of skin types in America. When I say polyethnic, I mean women who are made up of several ethnicities. If you ask them what they are, they’re going to use a lot of different words to describe themselves.”

Jada Pinkett and Mary J. Blige are also longtime supporters and investors of the famed product.

“They will serve as cultural ambassadors in bringing forth this acceptance that the definition of beauty is now colorless. There are no longer boxes of white, black, Latina, Asian. More and more women are checking the other box, they share the vision and embody the messaging in their attitude, appearance, projects and core values,” he added.”

[Source]

 

Ok, let’s keep the thangs Dirty and Pretty right now, shall we?  Some truth needs to be told. I see too many people (most notably, on the Carol’s Daughter Facebook page) making this into a “light-skin vs. dark-skin” issue when it is SO not that.

While I applaud the forward thinking and efforts on the part of the good folks at Carol’s Daughter, I think they missed the mark with this campaign.

Carol’s Daughter is a brand of hair and beauty products that is mostly used African-American women. This has been the case since its inception, so let’s deal from that point. They know this because these women, while “mixed”, are heavily entrenched in African-American culture: Selita Ebanks was recently in one of the most anticipated and talked about music videos from very notable hip-hop star Kanye West. Cassie does “something” in the world of Diddy and Solange is a singer/songwriter and Beyonce’s little sister. So let’s not pretend that this wasn’t taken into account when picking these women as spokesmodels.

They’re all beautiful women, but in my opinion, they don’t adequately represent the diversity in beauty of American women and certainly not the diversity in beauty of Black women. And NOT because they are all fair-skinned.

Beautiful Black women come in all shapes, sizes, hues and present their femaleness in different ways and this ad campaign completely ignores this truth.

Black women look like this:

And this:

And this:

And EVEN this:

A plus sized woman. An older woman. A woman with locs. A woman that doesn’t present “traditionally feminine”. They are all beautiful women yet I don’t see any of these kinds of beauty represented in this ad. In their new ad campaign, Carol’s Daughter presented what amounts to one standard of beauty and claimed it to be “diversity” and that simply is not true. The fact that they had to break down the “polyethnicities” of these women further tells me that they’re REACHING for diversity. If everything didn’t look so much the same, no explanations would be necessary.

Too many kinds of beauty were left out of this “Beauty in Diversity ad campaign and for me, it totally negates the effort. I’m beyond unimpressed. I think that if they were going to target Black women (which they so obviously did, despite Black women not being the only kind of beauty in America), they could’ve done a much better job.

~pbg