How This Gender-Neutral Beauty Brand Is Transforming the Makeup Game
Every Body celebrates inclusivity and the representation of human beings in every shape and form.
When I was a kid growing up, I remember seeing David Bowie wearing makeup and thinking just how badass he looked. His heavily shadowed eyes and iconic painted-on lightning bolt clearly had an impact on style and beauty in ways we could never have imagined. While Bowie was not the first man to toy around with gender norms, he became one of the most visible of his time and his impact left a mark on how masc-centered folks approach beauty.
Fast forward to today, and beauty brands are striking up more conversations surrounding gender neutrality. With an acute awareness of their trans-identified and gender non-conforming consumers, brands like Jecca Cosmetics and Malin + Goetz have taken to ensuring that no gender is specified on their products. But when Isabella Giancarlo, co-founder and creative director of new, gender-neutral beauty brand Fluide, came onto the beauty scene, they wanted to take gender neutrality one step further and develop an explicitly gender-neutral beauty product that was by made by the LGBTQIA community, for the LGBTQIA community.
The brand works exclusively with LGBTQIA identified models and photographers and have enlisted LGBTQIA allied freelance makeup artists to help elevate the brands campaigns. And, according to Giancarlo, each shade of liquid lipstick, glitter pigments, and sparkling nail polish has been “obsessively” tested on a range of skin tones to ensure it works for everyone. Another bonus: the brand’s offerings are 100 percent cruelty-free, ultra pigmented, and formulated without parabens and phthalates.
Giancarlo shares with Brit + Co, “Makeup and fashion are perhaps the most effective means of self-expression for me. I knew that a younger me would be dying to see queer beauty represented by queer people.”
For a long time, makeup has been seen as an expression of patriarchal beauty ideals, marketed for women to ‘improve themselves,’ but Giancarlo hopes that with Fluide they can take makeup “outside of this paradigm of cis-female beauty and opens it up to the potential of makeup being creative, empowering means of self-expression for all.” As a starting off point, they have launched a blog on their website titled ‘Future Fluide’ — where they hold space for queer makeup musings including the infinite ways we express selfhood, gender and identity and how we look, who we are and who we want to be.
While it has been an inspiring time to see people of all gender expressions and identities in fashion and beauty campaigns, it’s unique to see Fluide not just making and creating beautiful items for gender non-conforming folks, but also supporting them. One of the mandates of Fluide has been to donate five percent of all profits to a rotating roster of LGBTQIA community organizations, which currently includes the LGBTQ+ health center Callen Lorde and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
“Fluide originated from a place of love and since our inception. We knew we wanted giving to be central to the company,” Giancarlo notes.
While makeup continues to empower and become a means of self-expression, regardless of gender identity, we are excited for the possibilities of what queer beauty can become, thanks in large part to brands like Fluide who dare to put creative control into the hands of queer folks.
