Brown Girl Hands calls out beauty industry's lack of diversity in product photography

Lisa Azcona
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Hannah Harris, the 21-year-old founder of Brown Girl Hands, wants to create more space for Black and brown creators in the beauty industry. Here’s how:

Video Transcript

HANNAH HARRIS: The exercise I like to use is asking people to Google pretty hands. You get this overwhelmingly white Google search on Google Images, which kind of plays into that connotation that pretty hands are only white. Combating that would mean, you know, when you Google pretty hands, you get the diversity of the search result.

Hi, everyone, my name is Hannah Harris, and I'm the creator of Brown Girl Hands, which is an Instagram beauty community and inclusive content studio. The mission is to diversify beauty product photography by showcasing Black and Brown hands holding the industry's most coveted products. Typically, all the hands on my page are my own. When I have a product to shoot, I will just go outside, hold it up, and use sunlight as my light source.

Kind of the origin story started a few months before, when I read an article by Jessica DeFino. It was titled "Where Are All the Brown Hands?" It was kind of one of those things where you're kind of like, what do you mean where all the Brown hands? Like, I'm right here. It was really eye-opening as a Black woman and think well, I have Black hands, I could do this. After the first brand reached out, I was like, oh, we can work with brands this way.

Oftentimes, I can pair the absence of the diversity of hands to almost a microaggression because once you get down to fixing the microaggressions, and you really getting into the nitty gritty, you're not fixing the obvious signs of racism, you're fixing the things that are really ingrained in a system. What was missing from the beauty industry before, I think, was a sense of urgency and accountability.

So before, I think, we all knew about diversity and inclusion, but it wasn't an urgent topic that needed to be addressed immediately. And there wasn't anyone really holding brands accountable for if they didn't. And I think what we saw in 2020 was people calling out brands and saying, this is what you need to do going forward. And now we're seeing the progress of that. It's definitely not something that we, as an industry, have solved at all. But I think I really do appreciate the strides that brands are kind of making.

If you never post something, you don't really give people time to get used to it. But I also think there is a lot of foundation work that can be done in other areas as well, so talking about age inclusion, talking about ability and disability. I don't think posting Black and Brown hands alone is enough to showcase a brand's diversity and inclusion. I think it's definitely going to come from internal processes and who's represented. And I think as the teams themselves diversify, then we'll see that reflected in the content, in the campaigns, and in the products that brands produce.

If I could tell the beauty industry one thing, I think it would be to invest in the next generation of talent. I think there are so many people of color, women of color who want to get into this space. And, if given the chance, I think they could really change the industry as it is.