True Colors
Before there was Fenty
Beauty, there was Black
Opal. Now the under-
the-radar inclusive makeup
line is getting a reboot,
courtesy of two industry
veterans with big plans.
MAKEUP When Erika La’ Pearl was just
starting out in Miami in the
early 2000s, before she became Cardi B’s lead
makeup artist and before she touched up
Brazilian pop star Ludmilla’s signature lashes
and lids, she had a hard time finding
foundations. “Most of my clients at the time
were brown-skinned women,” says La’ Pearl,
and there just weren’t enough shade options—
and certainly nothing that worked with her
budget at the beginning of her career. Then she
found Black Opal at a local beauty-supply
store. “It was one of my first beauty products,”
she says. “At the time, they only had a small
range, but their colors matched everyone.”
La’ Pearl’s experience was not dissimilar
to my own. While Fenty Beauty’s arrival has
inspired an industry-wide mandate for
inclusive shade ranges, the past few decades
have seen only a handful of makeup lines
designed expressly for women of color:
Fashion Fair Cosmetics, once the largest
black-owned cosmetics company in the
world; Revlon’s Polished Ambers Collection;
Black Up; IMAN Cosmetics; CoverGirl’s
Queen Collection. So when Black Opal
launched in 1994, offering luxury formulas
catering to darker skin tones at drugstore
prices, it was a revelation for those of us in
the know. Created by Nikos Mouyiaris (the
late CEO of cosmetics manufacturer MANA)
with his wife, Carol Jackson Mouyiaris,
and Washington, D.C.–based dermatologist
Cheryl Burgess, M.D., the brand was a
labor of love. “It made an instant impression
on professionals because there was nothing
else like the foundation sticks or the invisible
oil-blocking powders on the market,” says
celebrity makeup artist and the director of
product development at MANA, William
Ahrens, and while distribution remained small,
it retained an outsized amount of buzz.
“How do they keep the quality [so high] and
maintain such a good reputation?” Cheryl Mayberry McKissack often
wondered while serving as the COO of Johnson Publishing Co., which
owned Fashion Fair Cosmetics, until 2016. (The company went bankrupt
in 2019.) Last fall, Mayberry McKissack finally got access to that industry
secret when, along with fellow Fashion Fair alum Desiree Rogers, she
bought Black Opal. Now, as two owners of color within the beauty space,
they’ve set out to revitalize the storied brand.
“You’ve got two black women advocating on behalf of women of
color globally, on their skin care, on their cosmetics, on their colors, on the
ingredients that are being put into the product.
We take that very seriously,” Mayberry
McKissack tells me from Black Opal’s loft-
style office in downtown Chicago, where
a small, all-female team operates more like a
Silicon Valley start-up than a
THROWING SHADES
THE BRAND IS HOPING TO
BUILD ON ITS REPUTATION
AS AN EARLY PIONEER
OF MAKEUP THAT WORKS
FOR A DIVERSE RANGE
MAKEUP>84 OF SKIN TONES.
VLIFE
82 APRIL 2020 VOGUE.COM
© TAMARA NATALIE MADDEN.
THE BLACK QUEEN
, 2010. MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS. BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.
