For centuries, many have seen and enjoyed the infusion of ingredients such as shea, black soap and chébé powder in some of their favorite beauty products. In spite of their success, there has been little recognition of their African origin or cultural traditions.
The beauty industry’s flagrant lack of intentionality continues to stifle and erase the continent’s rich stories and the people behind them for far too long, and African founders are no longer twiddling their thumbs for validation from a business that incessantly falls short in respecting their humanity.
Ahead, are three Black-owned beauty brands and their African creators who are pouring new life into these communities. They aim to preserve and share the remarkable stories behind some of the most magnificent customs and ingredients indigenous to the continent. Not only are they calling attention to how accountable sourcing and rightful credit are pivotal to their growth and prosperity, but doing so also gives consumers the privilege of discovering how Africa’s rich resources and beauty traditions have greatly benefited them all along.
Hanahana Beauty
For Abena Boamah-Acheampong, founder of Hanahana Beauty, a consciously clean skincare, beauty and wellness brand, her entire line was built on the basis of shining a much-needed light on where shea butter comes from and on who are actually responsible for why it remains highly-favored in cosmetics today. An exceedingly health-giving ingredient, derived from karité trees that grow in the Sahel region extending from West to East Africa, from Guinea and Senegal, and to Uganda and South Sudan—its global market is estimated to hit a value of $5.5 billion per Future Market Insights—shea butter has been a buzzy beauty substance for years. However, despite its somewhat contemporary popularity, this ingenious superfood for hair and skin can be traced back to the Cleopatra and Queen Sheba eras of Africa.
For centuries, shea butter has been called “women’s gold,” not only for its impressively golden color (although it can also take on a deep ivory hue, depending on the region) but also for how it fundamentally provides employment and income to millions of women across the continent. Organized by all-female cooperatives, the women utilize traditional methods to harvest the karité fruits, crush their inner nuts to extract the fine butter, bring it to a boil, and clean and package it for sale at local markets or for export.
Boamah-Acheampong grew up in a Ghanaian household where shea butter was used daily, so as she developed products for her brand launch in 2017, her decision to source it directly from Ghana made perfect sense. However, while doing her research, she uncovered the beauty industry’s horrible lack of sustainability and transparency for the precious resource, including those truly responsible for its acclaim. The female African laborers, the Katariga Women in Tamale, Ghana, in particular, are grossly under-compensated in the production line of shea butter. Hanahana Beauty’s business model is based on the importance of how the ethical sourcing of shea butter from its places of origin supports biodiversity protection and improves the livelihood of the women who produce it.
In addition to the support of the Katariga women the brand works with, Boamah-Acheampong launched the Hanahana Circle of Care in 2018, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing holistic wellness to women and their children by providing access to healthcare and other sustainable resources.
Salwa Petersen
Harvard graduate and founder of her self-titled haircare brand, created in 2020, Salwa Petersen hails from the Basara tribe of Chad—known for their bountiful, waist-length locs, whose hair care rituals have been passed down for generations—honors her country with exclusive, ethical sourcing of its abundant natural resources, particularly chébé, its star ingredient.
A brownish-red-like hued powder composed of a blend of native botanicals such as shébé seeds and samour resin from the croton gratissimus tree, Chébé promotes bountiful perks for the hair, known to reduce breakage, shedding and encourage healthy length retention, especially when mixed with water to create a thick paste, used as a deep treatment. Chadian women follow a series of precise application steps, covering their hair with the rich substance, and do not rinse it out for extended periods of time. Chébé can be traced back more than a thousand years through petroglyphs and rock art paintings found in the sandstone peaks of the Ennedi Plateau in the Sahara. It is an important part of Chadian life, as they consider long, luscious hair a symbol of femininity and vitality, as well as the mark of different rites of passage for girls making the physical transition to womanhood or when they become mothers.
“When I smell the spicy fragrance of Chébé, I’m immediately transported under a nomad tent, listening to traditional music and the gossip and laughter of the women in my family,” Petersen shares with Vogue. She describes how these traditional joint acts of hair care between family members are treasured, ensuring their centuries-old rituals and recipes are safeguarded and passed on by the descendants of every generation: “Chébé is a great excuse to hang out with our elders, moms, sisters, daughters, aunts, cousins and friends.”
The brand’s philanthropic footprint and alignment with the right partners is also a critical component of the brand’s identity. They’ve teamed up with African Parks Network, a nonprofit organization in Johannesburg, South Africa, that oversees the long-term conservation, rehabilitation and management of South Africa’s biodiversity, landscapes and heritage through a system of national parks. When a Salwa Petersen product is purchased, a donation is made to African Parks in order to preserve projects in Chad.
54 Thrones
After her appearance on Shark Tank in 2021, 54 Thrones founder Christina Funke Tegbe’s air-tight pitch worked extremely well in her favor, but Tegbe, a Houston, Texas native with strong Nigerian roots, had a primary goal in mind when building her brand long before persuading two of the five “Sharks” to invest in her business: laying a foundation of accessibility in order to spread the word of the African version of clean beauty.
One browse through 54 Thrones social media and you’ll discover a wonderful system of posts, emphasizing their remarkable line of locally-made beauty products by African artisans, all ethically sourced and curated to meet the unique needs of its customers. The centuries-old beauty rituals and ingredients from various African countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Nigeria and Eritrea are those which many cosmetics companies “borrow” when conceptualizing and implementing ideas for their own products. The brand relays these beautiful nuances through its Instagram feed, granting its users a deep dive into each country’s history, culture and beauty, from the significance of cleansing with incense in East Africa to the black soap and shea butter-filled skin care routines in West Africa.
“I wanted to approach beauty differently, with a strong focus on ingredients, storytelling, and attribution. The way that I could fully express that was going to the source, [which would also] take care of ingredients and transparency,” Tegbe explains in an interview with Beauty Matter. “When you have ingredients that come from a group of people, especially disenfranchised groups who aren’t usually represented, including that in part of your clean-beauty storytelling is incredibly important.”
With its flourishing partnership with Sephora, 54 Thrones continues to expand African beauty’s vastly diverse untold story to unexpected customer bases. “We’ve acquired a new customer that we didn’t even know was interested in African beauty rituals, so that’s been particularly exciting.”
