traditional beauty headquarters. “We never want women to
feel that there’s only one answer to beauty,” continues Rogers,
who served as President Obama’s social secretary during
his first term. Mood boards with magazine clippings and tear
sheets—68-year-old Jamaican-American runway star JoAni
Johnson swinging her signature silver, waist-length hair;
hijab-wearing model Halima Aden beaming in a patterned
scarf—line the brick walls. The photos are a storyboard
of what Rogers and Mayberry McKissack see as the brand’s
untapped potential: representing the nuances of black beauty
in a way that feels approachable and modern.
The refresh means branching out into color in a way
that goes beyond the award-winning foundations that count
makeup artists for Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Robin
Roberts as loyal fans. Forthcoming eye palettes offer everything
from friendly taupes to an array of greens and golds to
help women of all skin tones get a #fiveminutebeat, a hashtag
the brand is currently workshopping on social media.
A new collection of eye pencils, as well as new shades of the
revamped Liquid Matte lipsticks—nonsticky elixirs with
a lacquered shine—will also start rolling out later this year.
“If you think of some of the older ethnic companies, the
lip shades would always be dark—you know, berries,” says
Rogers. “Where are our bright colors?”
A new convert to liquid lipsticks, I find myself drawn to
Posh, a bubble-gum pink that is so creamy, so lightweight,
I almost pocket the lab sample. The
appeal is more than just superficial;
to rediscover a brand that changed
my own negative experience with
makeup, now reimagined by women
of color for women of color, strikes
a sentimental chord.
“It’s great to buy a product, but
it’s even better to have ownership,
representation, and advocacy,”
Mayberry McKissack says. The
industry veterans recently announced
that they have also purchased Fashion
Fair Cosmetics and have plans to bring it back to life by the
end of the year. “Some of these other folks are just coming
into this space. We’ve always been here,” Rogers says. And
this is just the beginning. The pair are particularly excited
about a recent partnership with
M. K. Pritzker, Illinois’s first lady, that
provides Black Opal products to
women transitioning out of prison and
into the workforce. It’s just one way
its new owners are hoping to build a
novel kind of beauty empire that’s
about community, not just cosmetics.
—janelle okwodu
It’s one of the great
mysteries: What
becomes of the woman who existed
before baby came along? Is
motherhood a zero-sum game, or
is there room for self-preservation
among all the new passions and
anxieties? In Emily Gould’s Perfect
Tunes (Avid Reader Press), a
young musician has a baby before
she’s had a chance to realize her
own ambitions, laying bare the
tensions between her desires for
herself and her daughter. The
recently expelled doctoral student
at the center of Rebecca Dinerstein
Knight’s Hex (Viking) is caught
up in a different kind of aspiration
gone awry. A scientist illicitly
studying poison, she is also indulging
an obsession with her former
adviser, a woman whose academic
ruthlessness she worships but
cannot emulate. Hex isn’t
experimental, exactly, but with
its meticulous mirroring of its
narrator’s existential spiral, it’s as
precise as any scientific observation,
and far more tantalizing. The elusive
protagonist at the center of Emily
St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel
(Knopf) floats her way to a charmed
life, drifting from a remote Canadian
hotel to the hushed, suburban
“kingdom of money” through her
relationship with a slick New York–
based financier. The follow-up
to Mandel’s wildly popular Station
Eleven (soon to become an HBO
Max series), the propulsive new
novel unspools with a similar,
wide-ranging cast of characters,
whose overlapping stories reveal
the shiftiness of even the most
solid-seeming figures. In Clarissa
Ward’s On All Fronts (Penguin
Press), the CNN international
correspondent charts her evolution
from a latchkey kid, wreaking
havoc in her mother’s town house
and drinking G&T’s with her
eccentric grandmother, to a driven
20-something gunning for a
position in mid-2000s Baghdad.
Ward’s memoir is a personable
and even breezy account of hard
work in war-torn places—a book
that shows that ambition delivers
its own rewards. @
Hustlers
Four new books examine
women’s ambition.
BOOKS
STICK FIX
BLACK OPAL’S CULT
FOUNDATIONS
WILL CONTINUE TO
BE THE CORE OF
THE BRAND’S
OFFERING, WHICH
ITS NEW OWNERS
PLAN TO EXPAND
INTO BRIGHTER,
BOLDER COLORS.
VLIFE
84 APRIL 2020 VOGUE.COM
TOP: COURTESY OF BLACK OPAL; BOTTOM: COURTESY OF PUBLISHERS.
