“This stuff makes my skin look like chalk.” That was 13-year-old Balanda Atis’s immediate reaction when she looked at herself in the mirror.
Trying on makeup is a rite of passage for many teenage girls, and that made it all the more disappointing for Atis when she applied liquid foundation for the first time and found the results unimpressive. Cosmetics companies, it turned out, didn’t make shades that suited her skin tone. Atis and with her Haitian American friends in East Orange, New Jersey, found that liquid and powder foundations had an unattractive, ashy-white effect on their darker skin. It was a problem regardless of brand, formula, or product — until Atis set her sights on solving it once and for all.
