Blindness & Beauty: How Visually Impaired Women Are Changing an Industry That Ignored Them

https://www.allure.com/story/blind-women-beauty-industry-tactile-packaging-for-visually-impaired

Christine Ha swirls her foundation on with a brush, feeling precisely where its bristles kiss her skin. She presses an eyelash curler to her face, sensing its two pressure points on her cheekbone, and closes her eyes, trusting that her lashes are hovering between the hinges of its convex jaw. She clamps it shut. Next, she positions a mascara wand near her lashes, inching it closer until the gentle tension of its stiff bristles lifts the tiny hairs. Finally, she carefully traces the outline of her lips with a pencil and fills in the fleshy part with a creamy lipstick as one would smear on ChapStick.

Ha is a chef (you may know her as a past MasterChef winner), she is an author, and she is blind. Despite having only 20 percent of her vision (she can see shades of darkness), she has always loved makeup and often does her own for TV appearances. But the beauty industry, which increasingly aims to cater to every creed and color, has largely ignored visually impaired people like Ha. This is bizarre when you consider that 36 million people worldwide are totally blind, and 217 million have moderate to severe visual impairment.

“People think just because blind women can’t see, they don’t care about what they look like,” says Sam Latif, who was diagnosed with low vision at five years old due to a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, eventually losing her sight completely in early adulthood. “They think that the visually impaired don’t spend money on beauty products or can’t apply makeup so they’re not relevant to this industry.”

Fortunately, that notion is being challenged from the inside by people like Latif — she is Procter & Gamble’s special consultant on inclusive design, a new role that helps ensure products are designed, packaged, and advertised to be inclusive for the 1.3 billion people worldwide who have a disability. Change is also coming thanks to the success of blind and visually impaired beauty bloggers, like YouTuber Molly Burke, who has 1.7 million subscribers, and Lucy Edwards, CoverGirl’s first blind beauty ambassador.

“When I first lost my eyesight, I was quite sad that I couldn’t look in the mirror. Applying makeup is a way that I can control my appearance again,” says Edwards, who lost her sight at the age of 17 due to a rare genetic disorder. “But beauty means so much more to me. I love how the products make me feel when I apply them. I love the different smells, the different textures.” Now 22, Edwards taught herself to do makeup (eye shadow and all) with help from her sister and launched a YouTube channel. There she shares tutorials both simple (bronzer and brow tips) and extremely difficult, no matter how good your sight is (liquid liner with a perfect flick).

“I don’t know what Ariana Grande looks like or what texturizing spray really does... they popped up on the scene after I lost my sight.”

The visually impaired are used to putting extra thought into their routines — they count the number of strokes per cheek to ensure evenly blended blush or hold eye shadow brushes at the top so that they can more deftly guide them to the lid. Vlogger Burke and Life of a Blind Girl blogger Holly Tuke swear by sample-size mascaras for better control (it’s easier to gauge angles and how close the wand is to the eye); My Blurred World blogger Elin Williams uses clear mascara for lash definition without fear of blobs or smears. Maribel Ramirez, who teaches independent-living skills to blind women at the Braille Institute in California, tells students to refrigerate eyeliner, lipstick, and foundation so they can use its chilly temperature to better sense where they’re applying it. “You make adjustments, and it takes a lot of practice,” Tuke says, “but after a while, it becomes muscle memory.”

Placement can be mastered, but what about inspiration, the engine that drives so much of our beauty routines? “I lost my vision over 10 years ago, so everything I envision is stuck in that time period, including my face and hair,” says Ha. She avidly consumes beauty articles for product news, while others, like Williams, listen to makeup tutorials to hear fresh color-combination ideas. “I don’t know what Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande look like, and I don’t know what texturizing spray really does, because they all popped up on the scene after I lost my sight,” Ha says. “But I do remember what beachy waves are, so I can imagine something along those lines.”

Which brings up a larger point: Even within the vision-loss community, the experience of beauty is vastly different. Most of the beauty vloggers mentioned in this article lived part of their lives with sight, and some can still detect light. Burke can no longer distinguish between colors after a rare retinal disease damaged her vision, but she remembers them (purple is her favorite) and can still see certain high-contrast things like the way glitter catches the light. Women who were born without sight, meanwhile, must devise their own notions of beauty, based on what they feel when they touch their faces (and the faces of others) and what they are told or read about.

Navigating beauty products without the ability to visually spot them is another challenge. Many blind beauty devotees can identify products just by feeling the tube or tub. In a video with beauty vlogger giant James Charles, Burke identifies nearly every product in his makeup collection as she feels them, almost all down to the brand and many by exact product name. But products that are less distinctive require tactile markers — think Cellotape tags, elastic bands, or homemade Braille labels. Still, what a pain. “I work full-time; I’ve got three kids under nine. The last thing I’ve got time to do is put markings on my beauty products,” Latif says. “I try to memorize them by touch.”

Inspired by her own struggles, she recently spearheaded a redesign of Herbal Essences Bio:Renew shampoos and conditioners packaging to include tactile differentiators for the visually impaired. “I’ve used my husband’s hair gel thinking it was face wash. I’ve used a hair mask thinking it was a body lotion,” she says. “I’m sure I’ll carry on having those ‘whoops’ moments, but the more indicators there are that help me differentiate, the easier my life will be. Packaging can be made beautiful both for people who can see it and for people who can’t. It’s not beauty over accessibility: It’s beauty times accessibility equals good for society. And good for business.” (The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that Americans with disabilities have a combined $175 billion in discretionary spending power.)

Herbal Essences is not the only brand to see the value in this way of thinking. L’Occitane has featured Braille on nearly 80 percent of its products since 1997 (and has teamed up with Orbis International, a nonprofit that provides eye care to developing nations, raising millions of dollars to fight preventable blindness). Bioderma includes Braille on its boxed packaging. Bath and body brand CleanLogic incorporates Braille on many of its products, and founder Isaac Shapiro, whose mother was blind, has started a nonprofit, Inspiration Foundation, that helps provide adaptive technology for adults with vision loss.

Farther afield, L’Oréal Brazil launched an audio makeup pilot program to teach blind women how to use Maybelline products (the brand is a L’Oréal subsidiary), and Shiseido has partnered with Google in Japan to create a prototype called Braille Nails — tech that allows blind women to “see” objects in their environment via a digitally coded press-on fingernail (it translates visuals into sound). Smell can be a guide, too, says Williams, who favors Too Faced palettes for their distinctive, chocolaty scent.

"It’s not beauty over accessibility: It’s beauty times accessibility equals good for society. And good for business."

In a perfect world, all products, even lip pencils and primer tubes, would feature Braille labeling, but the space it requires on packaging can be problematic. Companies are looking at techy alternatives, including scannable codes that could link to audio-accessible shade and ingredient information. Still, the best decision any brand can make is simply to bring blind women into the conversation, whether that means employing them or featuring them in advertising, says Edwards: “CoverGirl is really doing something by involving me in its brand. It may take time, but it will make a difference.”

It’s not just the beauty business that can learn from these women, but all of us. The way visually impaired women experience products — their heightened appreciation for the way a cream gets absorbed, the creaminess or chalkiness of an eye shadow, or the ergonomic design of a mascara wand — is profound. Beauty rituals are a feast for all the senses. And they also, crucially, have the power to remind us that we aren’t defined by our reflections. “Being free from mirrors can be a positive thing,” says Williams. “We’re so judgmental of ourselves. There’s so much comparison in the world. The fact that I can’t constantly check my reflection means I can focus on how I feel within, and not how I look.”