“Five Years In: 2025 in Reflection”
As we close out 2025, I’ve been reflecting on everything The Black Beauty Club built this year. But I can’t think about 2025 without remembering where we ended 2024, when I fully took the reins of my company. Going into year five, it became clear that the small team of champions that had been carrying this vision needed to vest, and that we could no longer be held back or afford the luxury of thinking small.
In 2025, The Black Beauty Club hosted twice as many events as we did in 2024. Our crowning moments included the wildly successful The Black Beauty Talks, expanding and testing The Club in key U.S. cities, and returning to Paris. The appetite for Club moments is only growing. In 2026, we will stretch; sometimes we’ll soar, sometimes we’ll be restrained, but overall we’ll be bolder, sharper, and better than we were this year. And yes—the plans are genuinely dope.
I’m often asked, “What is The Black Beauty Club? Who is it for?” And honestly, I used to struggle with where to begin. Let’s be real: we are the first to do what we do. I’ve watched imitators borrow the name style, the conversation style, even the framing. People often tell me I’m too noble, but truthfully, I’m never tripping. There is no shortcut to a room built on intention.
When I reflect on who we are, the answer is painfully simple: The Black Beauty Club is its audience. It always has been. The secret to our intimacy and our impact is that our community is made up of the actual vanguards of the beauty ecosystem. It’s not for everyone, in the sense that it’s for anyone who actually understands culture and that beauty is integral to culture. The Club continues to convene the most inspiring minds across industries: special founders, informed consumers, cultural arbiters, innovative insiders, and the creators who move the needle, not just vibes.
As a natural rebel, I’ve never been a fan of systems. Maybe that’s the Sagittarius in me, I don’t do guardrails. I also refuse to participate in echo chambers where we gaslight ourselves into thinking sameness is a strategy. I’m uninterested in creating spaces that feel repetitive, or in offering people a three-step formula for “winning.” What excites me is designing rooms that provoke thought, spark new ideas, and ultimately shift culture. Because if culture doesn’t shift, you can lead the camel to water—but if the water isn’t clean, the camel still dies. That’s my metaphor for the Black women who have gone to “die” in corporate America—the real MVPs. They are the ones pushing for us to be seen. And that metaphoric death is not in vain.
Let me give you a tangible example of a culture shifter: Jackie Aina. She was among the earliest beauty creators to merge cultural commentary with consumer impact, giving the industry its first quantifiable proof of the power of the Black beauty dollar. Whether people realize it or not, creators like Jackie provided the receipts that made it possible for Fenty—and many others—to launch 40+ shades with confidence. For the first time, beauty conglomerates had real performance data and commercial validation to point to.
And if you noticed more Black women in corporate beauty roles after 2018, that wasn’t a coincidence. Once conglomerates could measure the economic force of Black spend, hiring and investment followed. Suddenly, instead of one or two Black women sprinkled across a department, we were entering at scale, across R&D, product development, communications, marketing, and strategy. That is what a cultural shift looks like. And it doesn’t happen overnight.
Culture has shifted again. I spent a lot of time thinking about the downside of that—fatigue, fragmentation, performance over substance. Then one day, at my hood coffee shop, a friend said something that snapped me out of it: “Governments will change, but Black people will still be here.” It still blows my mind. He followed it with, “Most Western companies are obsessed with going global, but they forget that Blackness is already global.” My guy was absolutely spitting. It gave me the vim I needed to keep going. So as we head into 2026, my focus is simple: build better rooms. Rooms with real thinkers. Rooms that respect nuance. Rooms that refuse to flatten culture into talking points.
Keep an eye on The Black Beauty Club. 2026 is already stacked with first-of-their-kind moments, new collaborators, and big moves that don’t have a precedent in beauty—by design.
Thank you to the people! IYKYK.