![]() ![]() Then a company will make a product based upon their method, and it’ll make millions while the influencer gets a few pennies for the views on their videos.” “They invent methods and products all the time and put them on YouTube. “Female Black influencers are so creative,” she says. I wanted to help the Black community build generational wealth.” Once Gray’s invention became successful, Gray was distressed to find that she was also knocked off by Asian companies, and feels that she’s far from the first. “Black businesses have been destroyed multiple times, not just Greenwood, or Black Wall Street, and I think the hair industry is a perfect example of that,” says Natasha Gray, founder of Innovative Weaves and the “InvisiRoot Thin Part Wig.” “My invention journey was very intentional. For example, Black women in the US founded beauty companies that created hair extensions and wigs, but in the ’60s, Korean companies started moving in. (The case has since been settled to “mutual satisfaction,” the CEO of Olaplex told The New York Times.)Īt a moment when a top brand of lipstick can cost the same as a mid-range dress, a lot is at stake, and it’s easy to get pushed out of the space. Olaplex initially won a suit against L’Oréal, claiming the brand copied its hair-treatment tech, but an appeals court later threw out the ruling. Charlotte Tilbury pursued and won a copyright claim in the UK against Aldi after it released a makeup palette that she claimed copied her Filmstar Bronze and Glow. (At the time, an Aldi spokesperson said, “This matter relates to a product that was on sale for a very short period around December 2018.”) Revolution Beauty pulled its Honey Bear brow product off the market after indie brand Pink Honey accused it on social media of copying its Honey Glue Original Superhold for brows. ![]() For example, as of July 2020, L’Oréal has 3,717 patent families to guard against the types of lawsuits and conflicts that abound these days. You probably know that music is heavily copyrighted in the United States, and that fashion is largely not (the evidence is on display every time you walk into an H&M), but beauty giants take out loads of patents. Stoka was knocked off by Asian suppliers, who flooded the market with dupes-not a surprise in the IP game. She created a tweezer shaped like a Nike swoosh she called a “wand” she wanted to attach each little cluster of hairs to the eye individually, which made fake lashes look more natural. After that, when I’d visit her at home on Sunset Plaza Drive, she’d be focused on hair irons, glues, and cut-up lashes. Within a few months, they all flew off to Korea. My husband introduced her to an industrial designer for Starbucks who was interested in picking up freelance work, and the industrial designer introduced her to a brand designer. And as she became increasingly intolerant of going out without her lashes, and increasingly bored of sitting in Koreatown having them applied on end, she started messing with lashes herself, trying to suss out a DIY method. In other words, Lotti was a woman who could spot a hole in the market. After that, she started calling around to Barneys and other department stores to order real Balenciagas, flipping them for a higher price on eBay. This sideline faded when she landed a script deal with Fox, but then she started moonlighting as an online intuitive, gathering Hollywood clients before she went on retainer for a member of the royal family of Qatar. ![]() She’d noticed that most of what she saw for sale online was fake, and wrote a manifesto about how to spot it, then sold a PDF of instructions online for five dollars. Sahara Lotti was a screenwriter who was also furiously buying and selling Balenciaga bags. Back then, the French began sewing hairs onto their eyelids, and a Canadian in the US patented an early version of “strip lashes,” the familiar crescent of lashes we now buy in pharmacies. Since then, oversized lashes have been intermittently popular-think Twiggy in the 1960s-with the current explosion beginning in the early 2000s, when the Asian eyelash-extension craze began to rip through Hollywood, with celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Paris Hilton cramming into estheticians’ chairs to achieve peak flutter.ĭuring these years, I was living in Los Angeles, and I had a friend who was obsessed with lashes. That was ancient Egypt, where both men and women used malachite and kohl to darken their lashes, but it took until the 19th century to bottle mascara and start the false-lash trend. ![]()
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