Everyone, it seems, is trying to cash in on the woman of color.
After years of ignoring her, mainstream cosmetics companies are jumping on the multicultural bandwagon.
Prescriptives did it. So did Cover Girl. Maybelline too. Revlon did it before and is doing it again. Somalian-born Iman recently launched her own cosmetics and skin-care line aimed at-who else?-the non-white woman.
And now, there is Colores para Ti (Colors for You), billed as the first “prestige” line of cosmetics geared for the Latina woman. (Another brand, Solo para Ti-Only for You-is available in drugstores.)
Produced by Ivax Corp., the Miami-based company that brought us Flori Roberts, aimed at African-American women, and Dermablend Corrective Cosmetics (and last year acquired Johnson Products), Colores Para Ti is a 21-product, bilingual cosmetics and treatment line that made its debut in May at J.C. Penney and other department stores. Prices range from $7 for nail polish to $22.50 for treatment products.
Courting the Latin-American customer makes good business sense: Hispanics spend an estimated $502 million in makeup each year. Or, as Lynda Farrington Wilson, vice president of marketing for Colores para Ti and Dermablend, puts it, “Beauty is serious business to the Hispanic woman.”
She adds, “We really want to celebrate individuality, and not lock into one look.”
Witness the Colores para Ti press release, which proclaims: “In developing our color strategy, we had to consider every Hispanic woman, from our fair-skinned, blue-eyed Cuban clients to our Native-American clients from Mexico, and our olive-complected clients from Puerto Rico, Panama and the Dominican Republic.”
The promo doesn’t mention the scores of dark-skinned, brown-eyed, Afro-Latina women who hail from those countries-and whose skin tones are closer to espresso than they are to cafe au lait.
Waif escape
We all know Calvin’s fickle. First there was Brooke. Then Christy. Then, with much fanfare, arrived the waifish and controversial Kate Moss-coupled with the macho and equally controversial Marky Mark.
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They were hip. They were skinny. They were barely dressed. And they were everywhere.
Not anymore.
This month, commercial watchers will get to ogle Calvin’s flavor of the month-the slightly-more-fleshy but just-as-undressed husband-and-wife duo, Amber Valletta and Herve Le Bihan, as they seductively peddle the newest Klein scented venture: Escape and Escape for Men.
Watch them interwine in a rusty canoe on a deserted Panama beach. Kiss in closeup. Hear Amber whisper, “Are we dreaming?”
Move over, Kate. Calvin’s got a brand new babe.