How Women Built the Beauty Industry ... Then Men Took Control.

Remember that quote from my last article? "Your skin, and the future of the skincare industry, depends on it." It's been stuck in my head because it pertains to something so much bigger than just choosing artisanal skincare over white label products. It's about who gets to control an industry that women literally constructed from ground zero.

It was women who started the beauty business. Women who created it. Women who transformed it. And now the biggest companies are run by men, backed by men, and dominated by men who largely don't even know the products they're benefiting from.

This isn't about representation; it's about how corporate masculine ideals commodified women's creativity, taking actual formulation skill and turning it into white label generic stuff anyone can rebrand and resell. The same phenomenon that's flooding the market with interchangeable faux "handcrafted" formulas also reflects a bigger power shift that's been in progress for decades.

Let me tell you how we got here.

When Women Were the Visionaries

In the early 20th century, when women couldn't even vote, they were busy building the entire beauty industry. Not as consumers or spokesmodels, but as business builders and formulation pioneers.

Helena Rubinstein didn't create a beauty brand, she created modern skincare itself. Born in Poland in 1872, she emigrated to Australia and established a worldwide empire by introducing women to face cream and being the first individual to identify and classify skin types back in 1910. Dry, oily, combination, and sensitive are the names still used today, more than a century later. She also invented the first waterproof mascara in 1928 and launched the first modern mascara with an applicator brush in 1958.

Elizabeth Arden (née Florence Nightingale Graham of Canada) transformed make-up from something with which "improper" women were identified to a mass beauty weapon. She opened the Red Door Spa on Fifth Avenue in 1910, still thriving today, and formulated color coordination and the method of make-up application. She legitimized beauty literally.

Madam C.J. Walker (née Sarah Breedlove) was made America's first self-made female millionaire by developing hair products especially for African American women. From door-to-door sales of her "Wonderful Hair Grower," she established a business empire with thousands of women as her employees and filled a market entirely neglected by all others. Her system was not merely selling, but empowering women through education and financial self-sufficiency.

Annie Turnbo Malone, as a matter of fact, mentored Madam C.J. Walker. She built the Poro College in St. Louis, a factory, a beauty school, and a community center all in one. She understood that beauty businesses could be instruments of broader social change and economic empowerment.

These women were not mimicking trends and copying formulas that usually worked. They were charting unmet needs, developing new solutions, and building entire new segments of markets. Ring a bell? It's exactly what artisanal skincare entrepreneurs are accomplishing today—only now we're in an era where the infrastructure has been hijacked by patriarchal corporations.

The Corporate Takeover

Jump to the current era, and the world's biggest beauty conglomerates are dominated almost completely by men:

International beauty behemoth L'Oréal is led by CEO Nicolas Hieronimus. He began working at L'Oréal in 1987 and was named CEO in 2021, overseeing a €41 billion empire of women-founded brands like those of Helena Rubinstein whose company L'Oréal currently owns.

The pattern is replicated across the industry. Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Coty are all led by male CEOs who make product decisions that they likely never wore, for customers they never saw, in markets they only know from spreadsheets.

But here's the thing that troubles me most: venture capital funding that determines which upstart beauty companies are allowed to scale is controlled by men. Women hold only 8.6% of all venture capitalists, only 8% of firm partner positions, and only 7% of VC firm board seats. Only 2.7% of VC-backed firms have a woman as CEO.

So while women continue to innovate on the ground level—developing new formulations, building actual brands, solving actual skin problems—the money that controls who receives what innovations onto mass markets are controlled by people who have no direct stake in whether or not the products actually work.

The White Label Connection

This is where frustration with white label skincare on my part is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. The corporate beauty ideology doesn't care to invest in the kind of honest formulation work that women like Helena Rubinstein and Madam C.J. Walker pioneered. It's concerned with scalability, efficiency, and margins. The industry is being overrun with "easy".

White label items exist as the only logical outcome of creating a business model like this. Why use capital on startup formulation development costs when you can buy generic formularies in bulk and invest your capital into advertising and distribution? Furthermore, why cultivate real innovation when you can acquire successful independent brands once women have done the spade work to build them up?

The male corporate model does not value the kind of close product intimacy, customer relationship building, and incremental formula refinement that characterizes genuine beauty brands. It values whatever can be commoditized, scaled, and standardized with ease.

This is the reason why our modern beauty terrain is flooded with the same formula in various packaging, and the genuinely innovative products are struggling to find distribution and capital. The system that determines what ends up on the consumer has been designed for outcomes, not excellence.

Modern Women Still Pioneering Innovation

Despite being systematically under-funded and overlooked by traditional beauty power structures, women continue to be accountable for spearheading the industry's most profound innovations:

Pat McGrath revolutionized high-end beauty with the development of a billion-dollar company that operates more like a fashion house than a traditional cosmetics company. Her limited-drop strategy and editorial-level ingredients made the entire industry rethink how luxury beauty products are conceived and marketed.

Rihanna's Fenty Beauty did not just launch with range-inclusive shades—it forced all the large beauty corporations to instantly expand their foundation lines. The launch of one product line did more for representation than two decades of corporate diversity initiatives.

Emily Weiss built a beauty blog into Glossier, a billion-dollar business that pioneered the direct-to-consumer business model and community-driven product development that dozens of brands now try to replicate.

The artisanal micro-brands, such as my own Stark Skincare, are even leading change at the very top. Look at how the Green Beauty movement, that at one time comprised about 30 of us luxury indie brands back in the 2010s, began the massive ingredient-lead trend and orchestrated a change in the industry's course and in consumer habits, that was eventually picked up by the big corporations.

But check what these women had to do: build completely outside the established beauty industry paradigm. They were not able to raise money from the typical sources, so they used social media, personal networks, and unusual partnerships. They succeeded against the system instead of because of it. (Except Riri who was already killing it.) Many of us tiny indie brands have origin stories of starting off with just $500 to invest, and made it work out of sheer love, passion and belief in the products themselves.

And what happens when women prove that actual, real, innovative approaches actually work? The corporations controlled by men come in with acquisition bids. Because why develop new concoctions when you can just buy the women who have done it for you? And yes, female founders are allowed to have exit strategies and make some hard earned money along the way, but wouldn't it be nice to hand your company over to a likeminded person instead? I know that given the choice, it's what I would want.

The Innovation Paradox

The irony is that the beauty business is hungry for the kind of innovation based on actual formulation expertise and deep consumer knowledge. Today's consumers are smarter, demanding transparency, efficacy, and authenticity. Yet the company models governing the industry are designed to optimize exactly the opposite, mass production, generic solutions, and marketing-driven differentiation.

Women continue to rule making things work because we are the primary consumers. We discern the difference between a product smelling wonderful in the jar and one that actually improves skin barrier function after a few weeks of use. We observe when a vitamin C serum holds up well vs. one that breaks down in weeks. We appreciate formulations keeping in mind the way products layer well in real-life daily routines.

This expertise can't be commodified so readily or even replicated by white label suppliers or huge corporations. It is the result of years of solo experimentation, feedback from customers, and incremental refinement. It's just the sort of expertise that made the industry exist in the first place... and exactly what gets lost when corporate efficiency is the driving goal.

The Economic Reality

The gender split is not just one of representation; it's economics. When men control the majority of capital in the beauty industry, investment is guided by profitability estimates rather than efficacy or prospective innovation.

This compels a systematic underestimation of the kind of patient, relationship-driven brand development that is most well-suited to women. VC firms wish to invest in companies that can scale rapidly and exit successfully, if not necessarily those that best serve customers or advance the science of skincare. 

The outcome? Women create the innovative products at the craft level, men benefit from expanding and marketing it, and customers are left with an increasingly commodified marketplace where genuine innovation is more difficult to locate and purchase.

It's the same reasoning behind white label proliferation: why pay for in-house creation when you could just buy whatever has been produced and focus on marketing efforts? Why pay women to develop game-changing products when you can just buy their brands after they've had success? 

What This Means for Your Skin

And when I say "your skin and the future of the skincare industry depends on it," I'm saying that it's consumer decisions that decide whether original innovation is rewarded or whether cookie-cutter efficiency will remain the order of the day.

Whenever you choose products from founders who really understand formulation, you're promoting the kind of knowledge that built this market. Whenever you probe ingredient sourcing and ask exact questions about formulation choices, you're creating demand for authentic knowledge rather than marketing blather.

Your purchasing decisions are votes for the kind of beauty company you want to support: one driven by true innovation and art of formulation, or one optimized for corporate profits and mass-market blandness.

The founders of this industry were women who knew that beauty products truly should make a difference in lives, not just generate shareholder value. That vision remains among today's handcrafted formulators, but only if consumers take the initiative to seek them out and cast their vote in their favor.

The Future Worth Fighting For

The women's beauty business we established was founded on true innovation, consumer empowerment, and products that actually worked. The corporate model men instituted emphasizes efficiency, scalability, and profit margins.

We are at a crossroads where consumer intelligence and purchasing power can determine which model prevails. It is not exactly between handcrafted and mass-produced items; it's choosing to reward genuine expertise or accept commodified mediocrity.

When you choose products from individuals who actually understand formulation for the skin, you're joining the same kind of innovation that started over a hundred years ago with Helena Rubinstein and Madam C.J. Walker. You're contributing to the legacy of women discovering true skin needs and developing creative solutions.

The future of the beauty industry depends on whether we will continue to let women do the formulating genius and let men benefit from it, or if we will create systems that retain and reward actual formulation genius regardless of gender.

Your skin deserves to be handled by people who understand how it actually works. The beauty industry needs to be regulated by people who have real expertise at making things that do good for skin health, rather than quarterly profits.

Make your decisions accordingly. The visionaries who founded this industry would accept nothing less.