Five clean beauty brands founded by women of color have been chosen to receive grants and other business resources from the 2024 LIFT Beauty Accelerator program.
The LIFT Beauty Accelerator (formerly the National Beauty Pitch Competition) is in its fourth year. It’s administered by Rare Beauty Brands, JCPenney, and partners including the Black Beauty Collective. The program was established to support businesses helmed by female founders of color.
Winners were chosen from a pool of finalist pitch videos (watch them here). In addition to minimum $10K grants, they receive membership to the Black Beauty Collective, exclusive retail opportunities, mentorship from beauty executives; and in-kind services such as product testing and registration, retail support software, and more.
2024 LIFT Beauty Accelerator Winners
Chéribé (Founder: Salwa Petersen)
Petersen, a Harvard graduate, worked with a team of chemists and hairstylists to create the first 100 percent natural extract of Chébé seed to create ChébéBond Complex, the the hero ingredient for her hair-care line.
Prized by the women of Peterson’s native Chad, Chébé has been used in hair-care rituals dating back thousands of years, and is credited for the long, strong, luxurious hair for which Chadian women are known.
Peterson incorporated ancestral Chébé seeds inherited by her great-grandmother "with the best of modern hair science" to create cleansing, styling, and treatment products, with the Chébé seeds for the brand grown on her family's organic farm in Chad.
Daybird (Founders: Veena Krishnan, Whitney McElwain)
The company calls itself the “anti-beauty beauty club,” bucking traditional beauty standards and offering makeup-skincare-sunscreen hybrids designed to distill the morning skincare routine into one effective step.
Krishnan, a former chemical engineer, and McElwain, a former marketing manager, in response to the growing trend of adding more products and time-consuming steps to skincare regimens.
"Daybird stemmed from our desire to dissociate from traditional standards of what 'beauty' and 'perfection' mean." they say. "More steps and more products to cover and cure our faces didn’t resonate with us."
Deon Libra (Founders: Devin McGhee Kirkland, Brit McGhee Kirkland)
Not many beauty brands put so much emphasis on stress reduction. But it’s central to the Deon Libra brand, which infuses their topical and ingestible products with adaptogens: botanicals that help the body adapt to stress.
The company shares recipes, playlists, and informative wellness blogs on their website alongside their award-winning skin and body products.
“An estimated 90 percent of all disease and illness is stress-related. NINETY F*CKING PERCENT!” writes Devin on the brand’s website. “Yet, I couldn’t find a single beauty and wellness brand, committed to serving Black bodies first, and fully committed to providing stress education, community, and a digital safe space. So, I decided to build it.”
Ourside (Founder: Keta Burke-Williams)
“Scent is a language everyone can understand,” Williams says of her impetus to launch a small-batch luxury fragrance brand, while noting that for far too long, luxury scents were created by elite master perfumers “inspired by their fleeting moments and core memories.”
The Ourside brand compares creating fragrance blends to writing a story, saying its unisex aromas are rooted in scents that trigger personal associations, using “familiar ingredients to create unconventional fragrances.”
Naturally Drenched (Founder: Jamila Powell)
An attorney and former owner of a top texture salon in Florida, Powell launched the brand after the Covid pandemic shuttered her salon business.
She crafted Naturally Drenched scalp and hair products and tools based on knowledge and feedback from her former stylists and their clients, who were constantly in search of better products to use on natural and textured hair.
The brand credo includes the goal to “make waves and shatter boundaries in the hair-care industry” and to “speak positivity into curls, changing the narrative and affirming high-texture crowns.”
In addition, Scent & Fire (founder: Monisha Edwards) was selected by public vote as the program’s People’s Choice winner. The clean and inclusive fragrance brand creates allergen-free scents, inspired by self-love and cultural roots, for both body and space.
LIFT Beauty Accelerator winners get the chance to reach a wider audience by pitching their brands for potential retail distribution at JCPenney Beauty. Along with their membership in the Black Beauty Collective, they also have opportunities for placement in BBC's physical stores in Chicago and Los Angeles.