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Sharon Chuter is relentless. Since launching her #PullUpOrShutUpChallenge in June 2020, the Uoma Beauty founder hasn’t slowed down or stopped demanding that brands create actionable steps towards equality for Black and Brown people. The Pull Up or Shut Up movement was a game changer, mainly because it made obvious just how little companies actually do internally to champion their BIPOC employees. For the first time, major brands and companies got real with consumers about their employment figures, revealing, for example, how many BIPOC work in boardrooms versus behind cash registers.
While the campaign sent shockwaves through many communities, most Black and brown folks weren’t surprised. We’ve known for a long time why offensive or exclusionary ad campaigns get through marketing teams to the public eye. We know why it took so long for shades that match our skin tones to become accessible to us, not just in production but actually stocked in stores. It’s because of a lack of representation in the upper echelons of businesses.
What Chuter did with the #PullUporShutUpChallenge was make that knowledge the internet’s business. Brands were forced to respond with more than a pastel-toned Black Lives Matter Instagram or—worse—black square. It worked. Companies promised to do better, to be Blacker at the creative and executive levels, and to dismantle their internal racist structures by making diversity a priority. Now Chuter is yet again demanding more with the launch of a new campaign, Make It Black, and as usual, she means business.
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Launching February 5, Make It Black is partnering with Ulta Beauty and nine major beauty brands to reimagine the packaging of their iconic and cult favorite products beautifully in all black everything. These limited edition products from Briogeo, Colourpop, Dragun Beauty, Flower Beauty, Maybelline, Morphe, NYX, PUR, Chuter’s own Uoma Beauty, and Ulta Beauty, are available for the duration of Black History month through Ulta’ and the brands’ webpages.
“I hope it shows everyone who sees these products the transformative power of black,” Chuter says. “When we say black is beautiful, it’s not just something every Black person uses to console themselves. Black indeed is truly beautiful. When you take something that was any other color and turn it black, you know what it looks like: It instantly looks luxurious. It instantly looks beautiful. Absolutely sleek. Absolutely chic.”
Of course, the campaign doesn’t stop at optics. “We’re going one step further because we pull up for change,” Chuter says. “Everything we do has to have an economic benefit.” Which is why 100% of the gross profits from the Make It Black line will be contributed to Chuter’s Pull Up for Change Impact Fund, which provides capital to Black-owned businesses and Black business-owners-to-be who, historically, don’t get the same monetary backing as businesses launched by their white counterparts.
“Even in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement and all of the conversations going on, still less than 1% of available venture capital went to Black-owned businesses,” Chuter says. “And according to the last available data, 0.006% of available venture funds goes to Black female founders. That’s not good enough.”
By providing Black beauty brand founders with the capital required to take a seat at the table, Chuter is using her connections to put much-needed cash into the hands of people who are, in her words, “over mentored and under invested” in. “Everybody has a mentorship program for Black founders. There are incubators everywhere,” she says. “Does anybody think about what happens to these people when they come out of the mentorship program? I can tell you. Nothing. So at what point are you going to stop mentoring me and [start] investing in me?”
The goal of Make It Black is to do just that. It’s not just raising awareness with some very chic limited edition products. It’s bringing Blackness front and center in the beauty industry—and investing in it.
On top of that, Chuter is also working to focus the cultural lens on the positive things that black signifies, instead of the negative, by launching a petition to change the very meaning of black, as defined by O.G. dictionaries Merriam Webster and O.E.D. “This is an exercise in celebrating the beauty of Black,” Chuter says. “This is an exercise in etching into the minds of everybody around the world that Black is luxurious, that Black is bold, and Black is beautiful.”
Amber Rambharose is a beauty writer in Philadelphia. Follow her on Instagram @amberdeexterous.
