When will the beauty and fashion industry truly represent all skin colours?

Fashion and beauty reflect the culture we are living in, and change hasn’t happened quickly enough, writes Harriet Hall

Catering for everyone in beauty and fashion isn’t frivolous, it’s a fundamental sign of equality (Getty/iStock)

As a white woman, I can Google “nude shoes”, “flesh-coloured underwear” or “skin-coloured tights” and be met with pages and pages of options. I can walk into a make-up shop and leave with a hand covered in varying stripes of foundation, each one an almost-perfect match to my skin tone. I can find a bra that will virtually disappear under a sheer shirt.

The fashion and beauty industries have conditioned us to consider nude, skin-coloured or flesh to mean Caucasian – in whatever variation of white skin that may be. This discrimination has been increasingly taken on in recent years, as our awareness of just how much of our lives are buoyed by subconscious bias increases.