In 2017 the beauty landscape changed
for good. Rihanna launched her wildly
successful make-up line Fenty Beauty,
offering foundation in a range of
40 shades, and other brands scrambled
to catch up.
Dija Ayodele, 38, the founder of
West Room Aesthetics, the skincare
destination for Black women, and
author of Black Skin: The Definitive
Skincare Guide, is waiting for a similar
watershed moment to take place in the skincare
industry. “You had a category of Black women who
would happily buy make-up, all sorts of foundations
and concealers,” she says. “But when it came to
actually caring for their skin, they were left out of
that conversation.”
If anyone is equipped to helm this skincare revolution,
it’s Ayodele. She is also the founder of the award-winning
Black Skin Directory, an online resource connecting
people of colour to skincare brands and experts. She has
worked in the aesthetics industry for more than ten
years, has trained in everything from nails to advanced
skincare, and is a trustee for the Beauty Backed Trust and
a member of the British Beauty Council’s advisory board.
But most importantly she is obsessed with making skin-
care accessible to all.
“I don’t really care about me,” she says. “I care that
Black women and non-Black women who read my book
because they’ve got mixed race children get something
out of it. I care that they feel part of it.”
Moisturising has been part of Black grooming since
well before the skincare boom of recent years. Cultur-
ally it is as standard as brushing your teeth and isn’t a
gendered or luxury practice — but this doesn’t mean it
has always felt accessible. Within the beauty industry,
many cosmetic products didn’t cater to Black skin
tones full stop, but skincare is slightly different: the
products aren’t always the problem, rather the language
and imagery that excludes non-white women.
“The products have always been there and the ingre-
dients have always been there,” Ayodele says, “but
they’ve never been spoken about in a way that would
tell me, as a Black woman, that, say, a pigmentation
product is good for me. Even in terms of advertising
skincare, it’s only in the past four to five years that
we’ve had more Black women featuring in the adverts.”
This lack of engagement with Black consumers can
leave us unsure of what works best for our specific skin
concerns. For instance, when trying to battle “ashiness”
(a greyish, chalky-looking finish caused by dryness that
is more visible on dark skin), very few products acknow-
ledge this culturally specific problem in marketing.
“When the Black Skin Directory launched three and a
half years ago, we’d look through magazines and look at
how journalists had written about products,” Ayodeletells me. “Have they written some-
thing about a pigmentation serum and
added something like, ‘Darker skin
tones are more prone to hyperpigmen-
tation [a condition that tends to affect
darker skin tones where patches of
skin are darker than the surrounding
skin] — therefore this serum that has
kojic acid or arbutin, which are
pigment faders, would be suitable’?
There’d be nothing like that.”
The same goes for the conversation about laser hair
removal. The way lasering is written about in most publi-
cations means Black women often think it isn’t suitable
for their skin. Not so. “It depends which one you’re
using, it depends on how your skin has been prepped.
I have laser treatments every week so I’m always
conscious of taking pictures [and posting them on Insta-
gram] so people know Black women can use lasers.”
Her book, billed as “the ultimate skincare guide for
Black women”, intends to put our needs front and
centre. It touches on more general things — how to
work out your skin type, the do’s and don’ts for your
everyday routine, the best ingredients for your skin and
budget — but looks at issues that primarily crop up
with darker skin such as discolouration, increased
dryness and hyperpigmentation, the concern that
comes up most frequently at Ayodele’s clinic.
All in all she hopes to have created something she
sorely needed growing up. Ayodele was born in Sierra
Leone, where she lived until she was ten, and she
recalls her glamorous mother’s approach to her appear-
ance, citing a particular photograph that was taken after
she had given birth to her via caesarean section. “Her
hair was piled up nicely,” she says. “Her nails were long
and red. She was groomed!”
Her mum managed a hotel that was frequented by a
number of airline staff so she had a hoard of interna-
tional women’s magazines that Ayodele would riffle
through — Woman’s Own, Best, Bella. Though they
weren’t representative, she found herself transfixed by
the grooming sections. So much so that she created a
play salon aged eight, where she administered pedi-
cures and head scratches to visiting relatives.
When the civil war broke out in Sierra Leone, she
moved to England, where her interest in beauty was put
to one side in favour of schoolwork. “My family was
highly academic and because of the effects of the civil
war everybody was like, ‘You need to go into a serious
career, none of this faffing about.’” Yet her interest in
beauty persisted — she remembers trekking to
Selfridges to try on lipsticks that she would have to rub
off before getting home.
In search of a “serious” career, she studied business
administration at UWE Bristol, and after graduating
worked in the HR department of an investment bank.The products
aren’t always the
problem, rather
the language
and imagery that
excludes non-
white women
Bater & Street/ Trunk Archive
The Sunday Times Style • 107