Olamide's Viral Video Proves People Only Care About Black Beauty When it's in Crisis
The future of Bread + why I hope this was all on purpose
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Last week I came across a Tiktok from Jalana Torres (whose content I’ve been enjoying) that I knew I had to save.
To sum it up, she analyzed Google search volume for Black-owned beauty in order to prove her hypothesis that crisis is driving discovery for Black-owned beauty brands. What she discovered is that over the last 10 years, the spikes in search volume all cluster around moments of crisis for the community ( we saw it most prominently in 2020, for example). She contrasts this with K-beauty, which is associated with best in class innovation and excellence, while when it comes to what she coins “B-beauty,” the perception that we’re seeing is its association to discovery through distress and vulnerability.
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Truly everything is connected. Because just 2 days later, Olamide Olowe, of Topicals fame posted a now viral video saying the launch of her new brand Bread (which she acquired from Maeva Heim last year via her holding company The Cost of Doing Business) flopped and that she needs our help rebuilding Bread.
To intersect with Jalana’s theory—of course this video got a lot of attention.
But my first thought—because you know I’m a natural skeptic— was, wait….is this all on purpose?
