This Pride season, let’s put our dollars toward LGBTQIA2S+-founded and -owned beauty brands that are championing and supporting queer communities year-round.
Pride month welcomes us with colourful sidewalks, the strategically planned product launch and a month’s worth of rainbow washing. Even as many beauty brands are vocal in their support of LGBTQIA2S+ people and communities, the industry has been criticized for tokenizing queer and trans people. Beauty means so much to queer and trans folks — it is affirmation, it is visibility and, often, it brings out the truest version of ourselves. LGBTQIA2S+ communities are not to be bought; solidarity is not a monthly obligation and support for our communities goes beyond June. So, this month and beyond, let’s put our support in those actually a part of the community. See our recommendations for beauty brands founded and owned by LGBTQIA2S+ people below.
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Real-life partners Matthew Herman and David Kien created Boy Smells as a way to disrupt gendered beauty standards. What started out as a side hustle of mixing traditionally masculine and feminine scent notes together in their kitchen in Los Angeles has evolved into a line of candles, fragrances and clothing they have coined “genderful” as a rebellious way to be gender-inclusive toward their clientele. “When we started Boy Smells, we were in the process of unpeeling how we saw ourselves in the world and embracing a deeper, truer version of ourselves — our feminine sides — with pride in addition to the more prescribed masculinity that was expected of us,” reveals Herman. Even the moniker and the overall look of the brand hold major weight in untagging pre-existing norms. With “Boy” in the name and their pink packaging, Herman says they’re “purposefully poking fun at rigid gender identifiers and giving permission for both boys and girls to borrow from the other side of…
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