to call Jane Harper The Cheekbone beauty brand could be a dream come true in the most literal sense. The starting of the company almost looks like a movie sequence. In 2015, Harper lay in bed in the middle of the night, gazing what she had just seen in her subconscious: three young Native American girls laughing, covered in lip gloss. She remembers brown skin, rosy cheeks, and plenty of laughter, and so they were images she couldn’t shake — she had to drag out her laptop and begin writing, planning, pondering. Eight years later, Harper’s Cosmetics Company, The beauty of the cheekbones.Beloved have been photographed on the red carpet, on magazine covers, by celebrities and on a regular basis beauty enthusiasts. But to attract a straight line from that fateful night to runaway success would mean discounting nearly a decade of trials, experiences, sacrifices, memories and breakthrough moments, all of which were crucial in shaping Cheekbone. . The first A one-of-a-kind indigenously owned and established brand, because it is today.
The cheekbone is a radical and rarefied enterprise in virtually every sense, but in the hyper-conceptual beauty industry, it’s a good greater outlier. Sitting down with Harper to see the way it all got here about, it’s abundantly clear that her heritage as an Anishinaabe woman has influenced every aspect of the brand — including environmental protection, sustainability, and community engagement. His principal commitment to collaboration.
Ahead, Harper shares all of it with TZR.
How did it start?
Even amongst the modern flood of beauty brands, seemingly created and launched at breakneck speed, there is normally a common thread. Most of the founders are ultimately, irrespective of how tangentially, already connected to the industry. For Harper, this was entirely recent territory, and he found himself navigating a special moment in his life. Just two months before his stirring dream, Harper became alcohol-free after a four-year battle with addiction. She says that determination helped her. Loves the ways? felt [is there a missing word here?] Very supportive of his recent enterprise from the jump. Harper’s profession background was in seafood sales and marketing, with little knowledge of the beauty industry. “I think because I was sober and stayed sober,” she explains, it seems nobody in her family desired to stop this recent vision. “If I didn’t struggle with addiction and nobody. what Say something like, ‘You’re wasting money,’ or, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ [I don’t] What a negative influence it must have had on me along the way.”
Cheekbone’s first two years were dedicated to a crash course in beauty regulations, product creation, and formulation. Harper partnered with a supplier to primarily make the cosmetics that she would logo and license — a quite common practice — but only a few months into the project did she get her Began to review and query how the industry operates. “When I would ask this supplier or partner where this component is coming from, or any other component, these are questions they would never answer – I would be completely overwhelmed by these emails, and Immediately recognized that there was a big problem.” This applies not only to the source material of the actual makeup, but also to the packaging.
Part of the rub was Harper’s commitment to durability and damage reduction from the start. When she first pulled out her laptop to pursue her dream, she knew immediately that she wanted her creation to give back to her community in some tangible way. “I consider in indigenous people, especially…my people, Anishinaabe, are truly the OGs of sustainability. When you have a look at our oral teachings which were passed down, many individuals speak to this idea of interconnectedness amongst all living beings. It’s something that is innate in us as a group of people, as tribes and nations,” Harper explains. She lays out a principle that asks individuals to consider that How their actions in the present will affect the next seven generations.” You think about how it will affect someone, not just the next generation, but your great-grandchildren, if you will. .” Thus, even in this early iteration of Cheekbone that used a third-party supplier, Harper was fixated on products that were not only safe for consumers but also safe for the planet. But in an ultimately brilliant pivot, Harper brought everything — the lab, the chemists, the sustainability scientists — all in-house.
An environmental responsibility
Despite a complex approach to the planet’s well-being, “clean beauty” isn’t a term you’ll hear thrown around at Harper and Cheekbone. She points out that the now-ubiquitous phrase is really just marketing – there’s no global or even national consensus or regulatory statues around it. “We’ve come a good distance in what which means as a brand,” she explains. “Not only is it clean and secure for humans, but our whole mission is that it’s clean and secure for the planet.” This includes fauna, aquatic ecosystems, means to calculate biodegradability, and the process method. in fact Affects the environment. Paper, she points out as an example, is biodegradable, sure, but what about its impact on trees and ancient forests? As such, the Cheekbone team selects their packaging systems based on individual product formulas, which are selected based on extensive research into the longevity and durability of the makeup itself. “We’re also really transparent, clear with our customer about why we selected this packaging over other packaging,” says Harper. If the cheekbone uses plastic, steps are taken to ensure that it is reused after the consumer in its second or third life.
Cheekbone calls its entire surface laboratory a local innovation laboratory. The descriptor is apt because of the dual approach that primarily drives brand development. “We consider in Western science, obviously,” Harper explains. “Science could be very powerful. But marry it with Indigenous ancient wisdom, after which [figuring out] How will we mix the two to make these decisions? Harper analyzes the trends her audience desires to nail, the makeup they need, after which the team begins the engineering process. Many of the top-billed ingredients have special cultural significance to local communities — she lists things like aloe, sunflower seed oil, and powerful actives derived from plants, berries, called “plant medicines.” goes Currently, the team is 4 years deep into an initiative often known as the Niagara Project, which focuses on the extraction operations from the agricultural industry and its vast amount of waste.
Ultimately, the steep learning curve Harper initially faced, as an industry outsider with minimal prior knowledge, ended up being one of his best modern assets. Nothing stopped him from asking why something couldn’t be done, the way it may very well be done in another way, and discovering the background pondering that led to his products’ best successes.
Collective consciousness
Every aspect of the cheekbone beauty is built on Harper’s identity as a Native woman, specifically her roots in the Ojibwe Nation and her Anishinaabe tribe. Interestingly, around the time of the brand’s launch, Harper was exploring a different, tougher side of her heritage. She explains that in 2015, she was learning about the dark history of indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada, typically a compulsory attendance-style education focused on forced assimilation and cultural erosion. Harper’s grandparents survived each institutions, which gave her a recent perspective on racial trauma — she describes it as a moment, a revelation. “I thought, if I can change my life, how can it affect not only my immediate family, but many other people and families? If they see hope, that overcoming an addiction and this narrative Is it possible to change, be more successful and own a thriving business and all of that?”
To that end, Harper and Galbone Beauty have already donated nearly $350,000 to their community. This 12 months, the brand has awarded its sixteenth scholarship to local youth. “Honor and dignity comes from your generosity, what you do for your community, and giving back.” By this metric alone, Cheekbone Beauty is in a league of its own.
Credit : www.thezoereport.com
