MADAME CJ WALKER
But first let’s mention Madame CJ Walker — no Black History Month/Women History Month in Beauty list is complete without acknowledging the achievements of Madame C.J. Walker, the first American female millionaire. Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 in Louisiana, Walker fell into the beauty industry because she had a problem that needed solving: she started to lose her hair! Madame Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, marketed to condition and heal the scalp, was born! She sold her scalp conditioning products door to door, at churches and clubs, and even internationally in the Caribbean. Walker opened a “college” to train hair specialists in Pittsburgh, and moved to Indianapolis to open a factory, beauty salon and a second trade school. By the time she moved to New York and passed away in 1919, Walker had donated thousands of dollars to civil rights causes. Her combined wealth and value of property made her one of the first female self–made — meaning no help from a father or husband — millionaires in the United States, all due to not being able to find a solution to her beauty problem!
It is with great excitement to announce that Academy Award–winning actress Octavia Spencer (The Help) will be playing Walker in a Netflix miniseries that she is executive producing with basketball star LeBron James!
And get this: based on our research, there has NEVER been a movie made about Madame CJ Walker, and never a biopic about a famous person in the hair and beauty industry, EVER! So this series will be a first on many levels, all around. You go, Octavia!
ANNIE MALONE
When Madame CJ Walker was first dealing with her scalp and hair loss problems, she tried the products by Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone. Born in Illinois in 1869, and based in St. Louis, Malone combined her interest in chemistry and hair care products and developed her “Wonderful Hair Grower”. It is rumored that Walker actually stole the formula to one of Malone’s products and that caused Malone to begin copywriting her formulas under the Poro line. Malone also built a manufacturing plant and opened Poro College, a large campus that included classrooms, beauty shops, laboratories, an auditorium, conference rooms, a gentlemen’s smoking parlor, cafeteria, dining halls, ice cream parlor, bakery, emergency hospital, a theater, gymnasium, chapel, roof garden, general office, laundry, seamstress shop, dormitories, and guest rooms for the residents of the upper class Deauville neighborhood of St Louis. It was said that she employed 75,000 sales agents across the US, Canada, South America, the Caribbean and the Philippines as well as nearly 200 people in the community. She became a multi–millionaire in the 1920’s and was a generous philanthropist, making donations for a new orphanage (she had been an orphan), to the Negro YW/YMCA, Tuskegee Institute and Howard University Medical School, among other charities. She moved to Chicago in her later years and passed away at the age of 87 in 1957.
A skincare product created by Annie Malone.
NAOMI SIMS
Now let’s talk about the amazing Naomi Sims. She was born in Mississippi in 1948 and raised in Pittsburgh, always the tallest (5’10” at age 13). A scholarship to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology led to her entrée into fashion modeling to pay expenses beyond tuition. It was very tough going for a model with darker brown skin, but through her own initiative as her own agent, she was able to be on the August 1967 cover of the New York Time‘s Fashions of The Times issue, which eventually led to her being first Black model on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1968 and the October 17, 1969 issue of Life Magazine!
As with Walker and most people in beauty, Sims had a problem that needed solving. The hair in wigs in the early 1970’s did not have the realistic–looking texture of straightened Black hair. Her wig collection became a multi–million dollar business!
Then, following up on the promise she made to herself at age 14 to become the “Black Estée Lauder”, she created a perfume.
In 1987, ten years after Sims wrote the “beauty bible” All About Health & Beauty for the Black Woman — which went into multiple printings — Sims launched her skincare and makeup line. She told the New York Times:
”There’s a tremendous need for skin-care products today because of the stresses of the environment in addition to women’s monthly changes,” Ms. Sims said. ”Black skin is especially sensitive. It needs gentle but effective products.”
She used her own image for advertising. ”One of the things people notice about me is the quality of my skin,” she said. ”We decided I was the best person to advertise my products. Anything that bears the Naomi Sims name grew out of my own needs. I’m here to lay down a legacy for my great-great-great granddaughters.”
Naomi Sims, left; Pat Collins, right circa 1989
And that is when I was brought on National Training Director for Naomi Sims Beauty Products! I had already traveled to Africa for Revlon, modeled in Paris for Christian Dior, Azzedine Alaia and Patrick Kelly etc., been a beauty consultant and had begun working for Harris Publications. I stopped everything to work with Naomi and traveled the country training other representatives and introducing products to major department stores!
Representing Naomi Sims in the Bahamas. The newspaper promoted the wrong “Naomi”!
Sims passed away in 2009, but we all will remember her initiative to advocate for herself, to educate us about beauty and women’s health, and to provide quality solutions to beauty concerns of women of color.
EUNICE JOHNSON
Eunice Johnson, co–founder of Johnson Publishing (Ebony and JET magazines) organized a fashion show for a charity, and that “fashion fair” became a traveling phenomenon all over the world. Like Sims, Johnson saw a problem that needed solving: models walking the Ebony Fashion Fair runway were mixing makeup in order for it to look natural on their brown skin. When someone like an Yves St. Laurent brought out a trendy orange lipstick, the shade did not work on people like her, the models and the Ebony/JET audience. Johnson then sought to create a line of cosmetics for brown skin tones that was more affordable than Paris products not designed for her audience. In 1973, she launched Ebony Fashion Fair Cosmetics, the only Black–owned cosmetics line that had its own display at major department stores for years. Johnson was born in Selma, Alabama in 1919 and met her husband, John H. Johnson, while she was in Chicago earning a masters degree in social work from Loyola University. With him working on the magazines and her working to uplift the image of women of African descent, they made a great, important pair. She passed away at the age of 93 `in 2010.
LISA PRICE
Stark comparison to the wealth of the Johnsons and the rise of Fashion Fair is how Lisa Price started her Carol’s Daughter line of haircare, fragrances and bath and body care products. Her story is closer to that of Annie Malone and Madame CJ Walker. It was the late 80’s, the time when people were just starting to become more aware of the ingredients in beauty products. Price was working as a production coordinator on tv shows that filmed in New York City (like the Bill Cosby Show), making haircare products and body butters in her kitchen and giving them as gifts to friends and family. Her mother, Carol, encouraged her to try to sell the products. She sterilized her siblings’ discarded baby food jars, hand–illustrated labels with magic markers and filled the jars with her hair and skin butters to sell at craft fairs, flea markets and community events. That grew to her hiring an employee to help her sell her products from her home in the Bedford∼Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in the early 90’s to opening a store in 1999 in the location in Fort Greene that Spike Lee once rented to sell his movie merchandise. After catching the eye of major stars like Mary J. Blige and Jada Pinkett Smith, Price opened a Carol’s Daughter store in Harlem, and then began to sell in malls, Target and on HSN-Home Shopping Network. In 2014, Carol’s Daughter filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and then was bought by L’Oreal in 2015 but Price is still involved, appearing on HSN and holding public speaking engagements across the country! And on top of everything, Carol’s Daughter is part of an exhibition on natural hair care at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC! That’s a long way from trying to figure out to make a body butter with a mixer in her kitchen…
IMAN
Iman was a daughter of a Somali diplomat father and a gynecologist mother when she was discovered in Nairobi, Kenya by famous fashion photographer Peter Beard. She has had an illustrious modeling career but encountered the same problem that other models did: makeup was not made for her brown skin and she had to resort to mixing colors so that makeup artists who were used to models with pale skin would use the correct shades on her. In 1994, Iman established her cosmetics line for skin in a full range multicultural hues. She is such a respected role model in many aspects of the beauty and fashion business and it is an honor to know her!
PAT MCGRATH
UK born Pat McGrath, MBE, who started as a receptionist and in 20 years gained a reputation as one of the most sought–after makeup artists, is a real female self–made billionaire. Her Pat McGrath Labs makeup collection was launched with her own money in 2015 and her first product sold out in minutes. A year later she obtained outside investors to help expand her products and the brand achieved a billion dollar valuation in early summer of 2018!
McGrath’s interest in makeup goes back to her childhood when her mother, originally from Jamaica, made her aware of makeup on actors and models. The lack of shades that complimented brown skin led McGrath’s mother to mix her own makeup colors (hoping that you readers see a pattern here!). McGrath grew up and gained such respect at the fashion shows and studio shoots that major companies brought her on to develop products for them. And then the time came for her to develop something in her own name and history was made.
In 2013, Queen Elizabeth granted her the title of Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her renowned achievements in the beauty and fashion industry — and that was before she self–funded her dream that is now worth $1 billion!
GWEN JIMMERE
In March 2013, Gwen Jimmere was a mom of a two year old, who was laid off from her job just one month before her divorce was final, had only $34 in the bank and the mortgage due in 15 days when she had to take that leap of faith with her Naturalicious hair care product! Two years later, Naturalicious was available at stores including Whole Foods and Jimmere has become the first Black woman to obtain a patent for a natural hair product!
Jimmere was expecting her child when she watched the Chris Rock documentary, Good Hair. It made her hyper–aware of the chemicals she had been using on her hair during her pregnancy. However, she could not find natural hair products without troubling ingredients, and with a child on the way, knew she would not have time to spend most of a day cleansing and conditioning her natural hair anymore. She had a problem to solve (that pattern again!) and developed the Moroccan Rhassoul 5-in-1 Clay Treatment.
Her utility patent covers the process to create a product that is made from clay imported from Morocco. Instead of spending $10,000 on a patent lawyer, she took six months to research how to submit a patent herself, which then would only cost between $550 and $2,000 to do. If successful, filing for the patent oneself is a rewarding process but not for the faint of heart. Jimmere knew that owning a patent would not only protect it from copycats, it would give her complete control over the future of her product if she wants to license or sell it to another company!
Hard to believe that it’s taken two centuries for a Black woman to patent a natural hair formula! As we’ll learn throughout Women’s History Month, whether it’s to solve a beauty problem, health issue or even to win the right to vote, women continue to have impact on society, and Black women are increasingly taking charge themselves!
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