BAME BEAUTY AND THE COVID BEAST - THE UGLY TRUTH

By Pauline Lewis

In 2018, the British Beauty Industry employed over 370,000 employees and generated consumer spending of over £27 billion. Despite this, we were still confronted with scenes in the House of Commons in July of male MPs making light of the need to attend beauty salons. Opening pubs so people could drink beer was seen as a serious issue, but women needing to dress their hair and deal with facial problems was treated as a non-essential luxury. In one sphere of the economy, beer drinking was seen as an economic imperative, whilst in the other, the huge value of female lead industries was not even noticed. With over 10 million women in the UK and Europe saying they have different textured hair from the average women, the ignorance shown to women from different cultural backgrounds was apparent.

It is common knowledge that the beauty industry is heavily dominated by females. Up to 80% of all employees are female. The majority of users are also female. It is also common knowledge that women, and particularly BAME women, are under-represented amongst MPs. It is this imbalance that is playing out across the political spectrum today. There are many difficult situations when beauty services can help women manage after trauma, these include products and services for women who are victims of domestic violence, for women who are homeless, as well as for those already vulnerable in a society that judges by appearance. Despite this there have been so many inconsistencies in deciding which beauty services were allowed to open and which were not.

Guidance currently means that beauty salons cannot offer facials or massage services, even though these treatments form an incremental part of beauty services. The impact of this is seriously affecting salon owners, self-employed beauticians, employees, especially those on furlough, and most importantly of all, clients, the vast majority of whom, are women. Apart from the British Beauty Council there is little government encouragement to set up more professional bodies within the beauty economy who can lobby and inform the government. Women’s business and women’s spending has gone unnoticed, despite the fact that HMRC benefits from over £7 billion in annual tax revenue. However, the importance of beauty treatments goes far beyond the financial cost, the mental health of women is a key factor as society judges so much on appearance.

BAME women spend up to six times as much as white women on beauty because the market acts in marginalised way. There is a personal disadvantage in that accessing products and services is harder because the required services are not local. There is an economic disadvantage because products are less widely available and this makes them more expensive. Products for BAME women often have to be designed uniquely for darker shades and differing hair textures. This causes the research and the development of those products and services to be less accessible than for their counterpart white women. The result is that the full variety of choice is not available to the BAME consumer. In normal times this helps to create a parallel running market – a mainstream beauty market and a BAME beauty market rather than an integrated one.

The British Beauty Council have stated that they are going to commission an independent study on diversity and inclusion in the beauty industry in order to assess issues and challenges as well as celebrating successes and creating future vision. To address this, there is currently a petition being signed, which is supported by the British Beauty Council, to make education about Black and Asian Hair and Beauty mandatory in all beauty training. But the government must now accept it’s ignorance and help this industry to grow and thrive and be counted as a vital economic engine..

It is clear that the beauty industry which is largely dominated by women is a major economic contributor to the economy and the figures alone show that it is an industry that should be taken seriously. It is also of great personal value to many women and has a social impact which carries a value far higher than pounds and pence. It is hoped, therefore, that the interests of women in and affected by the beauty industry can now be taken up, not only by women, but also the men who have been voted in to represent them in Parliament.

“I am continuing to press the case to ministers – make-up artists can work in the film industry, but they cannot work for weddings – it just seems wrong! This is about getting our message across – there are women going through chemotherapy, or reconstructive surgery for nipples, and alopecia patients who need their eyebrows to be done. All of this is needed to give people more confidence letting them feel better about themselves. The beauty industry is huge and diverse.”

— Rt. Hon. Caroline Nokes MP, Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee