Faith Carter is the co-founder of MÜD, a skin care service that provides you with customized skincare recommendations powered by science. In this fireside chat, Faith dives deeper into the intersection of race and beauty, and how MÜD is prioritizing marginalized communities.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Reflecting on her educational and personal experiences, Faith emphasizes the importance of empowering all communities to prioritize skin health.
(Note: This fireside chat took place in 2019. As of now, MÜD is currently not an active service.)
What inspired you to launch MÜD?
As a Black girl, hair care was part of my hygiene routine instead of it being associated with beauty. Hair care tends to be segregated. I knew that the "Black hair care" products would generally have golden and dark tones, and maybe have a Black girl on the cover. Essentially, there were certain signals associated with a product for Black people.
One time, I went to buy skin care—I searched the skin care aisle, found a product with similar tones, and bought it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be bleaching cream.
This was a traumatic experience that made me disengage from all things beauty until my college research at Rice. I learned about the various chemicals in skincare that consumers don't really know about. Then, I realized there’s an information wall between manufacturing and consumption.
How does sustainability fall short in the beauty industry?
CPG, or Consumer Packaged Goods, have to think about sustainability holistically and not just in their packaging.
Skincare is following in the steps of fast fashion. Many of us are accustomed to just going to a store and picking out a bunch of products based on word of mouth. If it doesn't work for us, it just sits in our bathroom and that's the end of the story.
How do beauty and racial justice relate?
The economy of desire tells us it's "better" to have certain things—being thin, being white, being able-bodied, etc. Skin care is associated with these trends instead of prioritizing skin health, especially for marginalized communities.
How is MÜD bridging the gaps between racial justice and the beauty industry?
MUD prioritizes skin health and takes this angle instead of focusing on beauty. The skin is our largest organ and we should take care of it!
MUD is different from other personalized skincare engines—we do brand agnostic recommendations, don't take gender into account, don't center cis people, and get our data from scientific journals. We manually ensure we have information that helps our racially and culturally diverse users find products that work for them.
Essentially, if you build correctly for the most marginalized people as the first thing, everyone else is taken care of.
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