When I started Mèlasun project, I discover the Sunscreen industry narrative was the equivalent of a fit for all dress but designed with only model in mind.
It's not explicit, from the formula and packaging proposition which don't match all cultural beauty routines.
It insidiously defined what is behind “good taste.”
A very specific fantasy of protection:
clean beaches in a certain geographic setting,
clean girls,
clean aesthetics,
minimalism,
quiet luxury,
healthy glowing skin.
Protection became aspirational.
Visual and text narrative in marketing is reflect of the ideal a society aspire to be. And historically, Black and brown people — especially across Western diasporas — were rarely positioned inside those visual worlds unless we were flattened into stereotype.
The athletic body.
The exotic and quiet muse.
The urban cool.
The loud personality.
The resilient skin myth.
Meanwhile:
hyperpigmentation increased,
melasma worsened,
UV exposure intensified,
skin cancer detection arrived later,
and entire communities grew up believing sunscreen belonged to somebody else’s lifestyle. Not ours.
Because SPF was never marketed as healthcare first. It was marketed as taste.
And taste has gatekeepers.
The beauty industry spent decades teaching consumers what “expensive,” “clean,” “healthy,” and “premium” looked like. The codes were subtle but relentless:
white linen,
Scandinavian minimalism,
Mediterranean leisure,
pharmacy chic,
light skin glowing under impossible sunlight.
Even “clean beauty” became visually sanitized. Uniformity became aspiration. But the diaspora never looked uniform.
A Black American reality is not an Afro-French reality.
Which is not a Congolese reality.
Which is not a British-Caribbean reality.
Which is not a Black Brazilian reality.
Migration shattered identity into fragments from languages, ways of surviving, thriving, beauty practices, way of being seen.
Yet beauty shelves kept speaking to us like we were one demographic folder.
Same formulas. Same assumptions. Same recycled narratives.
Because aesthetics influence behaviour far more than the beauty industry wants to admit. People do not buy only efficacy. They buy belonging.
And when entire generations grow up excluded from the visual language of care, protection becomes psychologically distant.
That distance becomes cultural.
Then commercial.
Then medical.
MÈLASUN was never built to become “inclusive SPF.” That language already feels outdated. We are more interested in dismantling the visual politics of protection itself.
Because Black identity today is plural.
Fragmented.
Contradictory.
Elegant.
Challenging.
Soft.
Hyper-visible.
Diasporic.
Minimalist.
Maximalist.
And impossible to reduce into one aesthetic narrative.
That complexity deserves products designed with intention — not adaptation.
The future of beauty to multiplicity. To people who move between cultures, aesthetics and climates. Social medias already destroyed the fantasy of singular identity years ago.
Consumers are ahead of the industry now. Beauty industry is still catching up.