What does Boots offer in makeup?
Boots offers a large range of makeup brand from budget-friendly high-street names and luxury high-end counters, available on both online and physical stores. The brands that boots offer are in different price ranges:
- High Street and budget friendly means affordable, accessible everyday shopping option. High street brands are mainstream, widely available brands that can easily be purchased in any town or city. They offer an reasonable quality at accessible price point because of mass production. The price range usually is around £5 to £15, examples of brands in high street and budget friendly brands are e.l.f, Maybelline, No7 and NYX.
- Premium and luxury brands are makeup brands that are high-end, higher-priced products that focuses on prestige, advanced ingredients, that offer a much more luxurious experience shopping. Premium brands often sit between the high street and ultimate luxury and offer quality, trend-setting formulas, and extensive shade range that high street brands don't. Premium brands often use sleek packaging, professional makeup artists or celebrities to showcase their products. This is usually at a price range of £20 to £35. Luxury brands often known as prestige or designer brands is a higher tier of price, heritage and status. These are often sold by dedicated, staffed beauty counters where they give 1-2-1 consultations and shade matching. Luxury brands are historically fashion houses or legendary beauty pioneers, like Chanel, Dior and Estee Lauder that focus on heavy, opulent packaging like glass, or gold casing, signature fragrances and exclusive, proprietary skincare ingredients. This is usually at a price range of £35 to £60+.
What are the issues of high street makeup for providing inclusivity for darker skin tones?
High street brands have tried to provide inclusivity, but still struggle to. The beauty industry has faced and continue to face disagreements with the makeup products provided and the issues with formula, when it comes to catering for darker skin tones. One of them, being issues with formula leaving "ashy" or grey finish, this happens when darker skin tones apply products onto their skin and begin to get a dark cast after application. The causes of this is due to many mass-market manufacturers formulating deeper shades by simply adding black, white or use orange pigments to a generic base. In recent cosmetic industry research highlights that preventing this grey appearance requires specific knowledge on undertone science, incorporating ultramarine blue and precise red additives. High street brands often fall behind in using the advanced pigmentation. Another issue with high street makeup brand is the failure to account for people with melanin, such as rich golden, neutral, olive or cool red tones. When high street/budget friendly brands expand into darker shades, they often use a one-size-fits-all, intense orange or reddish-brick undertone. This often causes an unnatural contrast, forcing consumers to buy separate colour-adjusting pigments just to make high-street makeup usable.
What are issues that both high street makeup and premium brands struggle to offer?
Though premium brands have created more inclusive shade ranges, many high-street companies have created marketing techniques such as performative inclusivity. This is when a brand would introduce 40 or 50 shades of foundation, but when observed 30 to 35 of those shades cater to entirely fair and medium skin tones, leaving the deeper skin tones with 4 or 5 poorly graduated shades that represents that demographic of consumers. An example of this is the backlash that occurred when the brand Youthforia launched a deep shade that critics argued was pure, flat black face paint rather than naturally occurring skin tone.
What happens when high street makeup brands offer inclusivity?
Though high street makeup brands will create inclusivity and formulate an inclusive shade range online, this tends to disappear in physical store shelves. As physical high-street stores often have a limited space, they would entirely remove deeper shades from local shop floors, online stocking them exclusively online. This creates a retail dynamic where consumers with darker skin tones cannot physically swatch test, buy an emergency item in-store, an experience handed freely to lighter-skinned shoppers. Opinions do vary, as some community forums like Reddit Brown beauty community describe Maybelline Fit Me a mass-market line as drastically improving.
How far does the issue with inclusivity go in makeup? Past Foundation?
To build a flawless base needs a comprehensive product ecosystem, but high-street brands have gaps beyond foundation, as high street/budget brands lack adequate variety in other products for deeper skin tones such as deep, warm bronzers that don't look muddy, highly pigmented blushes that show up vividly on rich complexions and translucent setting powders that not bake into white or yellow cast.
How does A Star cosmetics bridge that gap?
A Star cosmetics is a makeup brand that offers that high quality pigmented products in a budget-friendly price range, as our Star cream blush is retailed price at £15.
We have formulated this blush, especially testing on a wide range of skin tones, making sure that it is pigmented enough for darker skin tones. Esther, the CEO of A Star cosmetics has been the subject of issues when looking for makeup products that showed up on her skin tone. She often had to purchase from luxury brands who also struggled to cater to her requirements. As she was consistently working, she needed high quality and accessible products at a reasonable price range. She says "If makeup is beauty, than we are all beautiful too." Meaning, if WE (humans) are beauty, then WE are all makeup.
Purchase the Star cream blush today at https://astarcosmetics.shop/collections/blush-cosmetics/products/star-cream-blush-for-radiant-glow-easy-application-all-day-wear
Use the discount code: STAR WITH US for 10% off.