L'Oreal - Transphobia to Triumph

Hey guys!

I wanted to touch base about my experience working with L’Oreal and the backstory of my work with Jecca, because I was really excited to find out that Jecca had partnered with L’Oreal initiative schemes which provided more guidance and assistance. It’s not owned, but it’s had some early guidance and I think that was a really awesome step for L’Oreal to make as it was such an important move for LGBT led businesses and the inclusivity in the industry.

My background with L’Oreal was a bit of a strange one because during 2015 I was actually approached to do a second competition, as a follow up to my win of the You Generation Competition. I had the platform, the funding and now I wanted to make makeup and if you recall I went to LA to promote my brush launch with James st James and a lot of the drag race queens. I went to Beauty Con and was discussing some partnerships and we really were making moves to design makeup, so when the Brush contest promoted the opportunity to partner with a new creator on designing makeup, which was the tagline, I was fully into the mix.

We set out to create a new version of my classic Boy to Girl tutorial which I wanted to keep in theme because my work has always reflected my life experience and I remember when we won You Gen and I couldn’t believe how much work I had put into branding myself as the first transgender person to win a competition like that, I wanted it to be seen by more people that I had done that accomplishment. Because L’Oreal had not partnered in any type of campaign whether print, online or social as this was, with a trans person. I wanted it to be groundbreaking and I created something that was within the time frames, they limited it to be 3 minutes so I was really happy to have been voted by all my audience enough to get through to the finals.

Now during the promo I was doing in LA, I found out that there was a number of people who had used vote buying websites to promote their work and basically the whole contest was in shambles because people who were simply everyday makeup users were creating content on digicams that were receiving 5000 votes when four others and myself, were building a relationship with our audience enough to earn those votes. So we didn’t get the preinterviews which involved being filmed with our family, having a campaign about ourselves and a reveal that we were in the finals. It became the second time I’d been slighted by things outside of my control. But alas, we got the emails and we were told that we were in the finals and I was really happy to be in LA, working on my own stuff and now have a L’Oreal product potentially in the works.

Now my idea was to create a runway look, after slaying the competition in the UK, where I would be an old man and I’d reveal the latex mask at the runway. I had assistance doing the first trial of this where I did a cowboy with an old man’s face, on my Youtube channel if you recall at the time. It was what I was asked to do when management scouted me to work with Manny and Patrick in LA.

Back to L’Oreal, we got to the hotel in London and I met all the people that were there for the event, they had similarly had a frustrating experience to get there and it was always a case of no organization. We were filmed doing tutorials and campaign images, I am the first-ever trans person to have been in an L’Oreal digital campaign and whilst waiting in the wings, I get an email from the L’Oreal team saying that there was no prize. The money they offered in the tagline was equivalent to working for an assistant position and you did not get to design makeup. It was a complete farce and I was really upset by this because I was just off of a plane from the US, I didn’t have any interest in being in a contest that was providing the type of work I did already. I thought it was very off to expect people to be told they’d make a lot of money and then be rewarded with a half prize. So I didn’t participate in the makeup challenge, the products were fundamentally missing and I just used lipstick to blend out on the face because I had no interest at that time to be involved. A lovely lady from Belfast went through to the next round.

It was really strange, I have to be honest because Cheryl Cole was there, Val Garland was there, there was no interaction with anyone and I found it to be extremely rude that no one came over and actually spoke to us. It was such a time weary event for very little. Even had there been a better set up and they’d organized more footage, the only benefit would have been to use the campaign as promotional material because we never even had a hello or a congratulations from the people who were there to judge the competition. So in saying this, I wanted to illustrate how much work and creative passion goes into everything I do as an artist and most of the time the payout is not there, which is why I am SO passionate about trans people being aware that our time is worth as much as our talent, we deserve to be treated with respect. Even if you’re not given the same visibility, you deserve decency at the least.

So I wrote in my Jecca Blog a bit about why I chose to work with Jecca, so check out that whole thing because it goes through the timeline. But I was really excited to partner with Jecca and to refresh my experience with L’Oreal as I think there was some controversy about other trans people working with the Paris line after this took place. I was invited with Jecca to talk to the teams with Ellis, who is a fantastic guy who works with NYX and has pioneered their internal Out movement, which is working on how to create more inclusivity in the company.

We took a panel, and we spoke to many of the team about my work, I kept it light because I didn’t want to go into the backstory but the attitudes had definitely shifted. I felt that there was a huge amount of support and interest in LGBT experiences and it really excited me because we had a lot to say. One of my main points is, you use images of makeup close up all the time in brands to show the before and after of mascaras for example… That role as a model should be open to anyone of any creed who has eyes. That’s as simple as it gets. Why would you need to do a press campaign about inclusivity when you can simply be inclusive just doing the obvious things.

I also wanted to illustrate that as a business, you have to train your front of store staff to be aware that any potential person walking up to you is a prospective patron. If you see a man in a business suit come over, don’t assume the lipstick is for his wife, for all you know you could be talking to she, and you’ve got the total wrong end of the stick. You have to be aware of this type of thing because you lose clients from this lack of couth and it has changed the opinion of many prospective buyers because that first experience in a department store with a shovey salesperson has stopped that individual repurchasing anything. It’s happened to me.

So I wanted to illustrate those points, I obviously covered the basis that doesn’t need illustrating and Jess spoke about the need for representation for trans people, the inclusion that can be obvious. So I had a great experience and I was really touched to be one of the first speakers involved in this project.

I would absolutely love to do something, now that there is an effort with L’Oreal because I think they’re such a machine that they lose sight of the individual components at times and they needed some sort of support for trans employees, which they now are working on and just retraining from the ground up. There’s a lot of room to get it right, and we might have something in the works. From Transphobia to Triumph, it definitely is an exciting time.

Sound off in the comments and let me know what points you’d like to be covered and changed, as I have loads coming and wanna cover all bases.