Forgotten Founders of the Beauty Industry
Who gets remembered when the story of beauty is told? Who gets the headline, the credit, the legacy? More importantly, who gets forgotten?
The modern beauty industry is often described as revolutionary. Inclusive. Feminist. But dig just beneath the surface, and you find something more complicated. You find innovation that was extracted. Labor that was hidden. Genius that was erased. Behind today’s billion-dollar brands are names we rarely hear. Black women. Immigrant chemists. Queer artists. People who shaped what beauty is but whose stories were edited out of its history.
This is not just about recognition. It is about ownership. Because when you are written out of history, you are also written out of power. Out of profit. Out of protection. And that silence echoes through the industry even now. You see it in who leads labs. Who runs global conglomerates. Who gets to patent the next big thing. And who is told, again and again, to be grateful just to be included.
Let’s start with a name you might know. Madam C. J. Walker. Often credited as the first female self-made millionaire in America. She built a beauty empire in the early 1900s, creating products for Black women that no one else cared to make. But her story is bigger than the fortune. Walker trained an entire network of sales agents—mostly Black women—to become financially independent, self-educated, and community-rooted. She saw beauty not just as surface, but as strategy. A way to reclaim dignity and power in a country built to deny it.
But Walker was not the only one. She was part of a larger, often invisible, movement of Black female entrepreneurs. Marjorie Joyner, for example, patented a permanent wave machine in 1928. It revolutionized hair styling across the country. Joyner was also deeply involved in Black education and political organizing, mentoring thousands of young women in both business and beauty. Yet her name rarely appears in mainstream beauty history. Even though her invention shaped decades of salon culture, her patent was owned by the company she worked for. Not by her.
Annie Turnbo Malone, a chemist and entrepreneur who predated Madam C. J. Walker, created a line of hair care products specifically for Black women under the brand name Poro. She trained thousands of women in cosmetology and business, building schools and investing in her community. She was a pioneer in every sense, yet her contributions are often overshadowed by those who came after. Walker herself was one of Malone’s former sales agents. Malone laid the foundation for what would become an entire industry, yet history rendered her a footnote.
Hazel Bishop is another name worth knowing. In the 1940s, she developed the first long-lasting, no-smear lipstick. Her invention changed the cosmetics game entirely. But after starting her own company, she was pushed out by investors. The brand kept her name. She lost control. And over time, the credit. Hazel Bishop lipstick became a household product. Hazel Bishop the woman became a footnote.
And then there are the queer artists. The makeup artists of early Hollywood. The drag performers who mastered contour before it had a name. The men in ball culture who created entire aesthetics that now appear in runway shows and tutorials. The beauty industry borrowed their techniques, their language, their vision. But rarely their names. They were brilliant. But they were not deemed marketable. So their impact was kept underground. And their stories went undocumented.
Kevyn Aucoin, a gay man and one of the most influential makeup artists of the 1990s, helped redefine beauty for a generation. He was one of the first to champion makeup as a tool for self-expression, not just perfection. He worked with every major celebrity of the era and authored best-selling books that taught people how to see beauty in all types of faces. Aucoin was open about his sexuality and his struggle for acceptance in the industry. He carved space where there was none, but even his legacy has faded too quickly in popular memory.
Even deeper in the supply chain are the immigrant workers. The chemists. The factory laborers. The pigment sorters. Many from the Global South. Many undocumented. Their fingerprints are on the products we wear. Their knowledge of herbs, minerals, extraction processes, and color chemistry has been folded into mainstream formulations for decades. But the credit travels elsewhere. Up the chain. To boardrooms. To influencers. To founders with different faces.
Consider the women of Korea who laid the groundwork for modern skincare with innovations in essences, sheet masks, and layered hydration routines. Korean beauty, or K-beauty, has now become a global marketing category. But how often are the original formulators, scientists, and domestic workers behind the rituals acknowledged in the branding? The ritual is lifted. The credit is not.
In India, Ayurvedic practices involving turmeric, sandalwood, and saffron have been used for centuries in skin care. These ingredients are now marketed globally as “superfoods for the skin.” But the cultural knowledge from which they stem is often stripped of context. Traditional knowledge, passed down through families, healers, and women’s networks, becomes white-labeled and resold with no mention of its origins.
You can also look at the influence of Indigenous beauty practices across the Americas. From the ceremonial face painting of the Quechua and Aymara people in the Andes to the medicinal use of clay masks by the Navajo, these practices predate modern skincare by millennia. And yet, when clay masks are packaged today as luxury items, the communities who originated them are almost never credited or compensated.
Japanese innovations have also shaped the industry in major ways. The invention of blotting papers, originally created from excess paper used in gold leaf manufacturing, revolutionized oil control in cosmetics. The concept of layering skincare products—now a global trend—has roots in the meticulous Japanese philosophy of minimal but effective beauty rituals. Again, the lineage is rarely acknowledged in the glossy marketing campaigns of Western brands.
It is not enough to say their names. We have to understand how the system was built to silence them. Because the truth is, erasure is not passive. It is intentional. It is structural. It happens when you are not invited to the table. When you are not listed as an author. When your patent is filed under someone else’s name. When your work becomes aestheticized, but your identity remains marginalized.
Reclaiming these stories is not about nostalgia. It is about repair. About showing that beauty has always been shaped by the very people it has tried to leave behind. And that the future of beauty will only be truly inclusive if it begins with truth. That means going back. Unearthing the forgotten. Naming what was stolen. And making space for new kinds of founders, new kinds of makers, to rise with full credit and full voice.
Because beauty has never belonged to just one face. And neither should its history.