BEAUTY BRANDS TO KNOW: CHEEKBONE BEAUTY
CHEEKBONE BEAUTY
Originally from Ontario, Canada, Jenn Harper is the Founder and CEO of Indigenous beauty brand Cheekbone Beauty Cosmetics. After over a decade of working in the food industry, a sudden dream prompted Jenn to create sustainable beauty products that would help Indigenous kids around the world feel seen and valued. By scaling Cheekbone Beauty, now available in Sephora Canada, Jenn is advocating for active sustainable practices in the beauty industry, healing trans-generational trauma in her community, and reimagining the future of Indigenous representation.
SHEER: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
JENN HARPER: My name is Jenn Harper and I’m the founder and CEO of Cheekbone Beauty cosmetics. We’re headquartered in City of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada and this is also where I grew up and live with my family. But I was born in Thunder Bay which is Northern Ontario, about 16 hours from City of St. Catharines. And my family’s home community, or our reservation, is called North West Angle #33 and that’s most of the border of Manatoba, even further into Ontoario heading west. I’m also a mom and a wife.
SHEER: How did you get your start in the beauty industry?
JH: I’ve always been an avid beauty consumer. I could hang out in any beauty retailer touching and trying out everything. I never had any interest or was in the beauty industry. I was in the food industry most of my career and started in hospitality in boutique style hotels creating fancy experiences for customers. Then I spent the last 12 years in sales and marketing for food distribution companies. The last eight years of that I spent in the seafood industry.
I had this crazy dream in 2015, like hopped out the bed in the middle of the night, and there were Native little girls covered in lip gloss. And what I remembered most in the dream was their rosy little cheeks and their joy and happiness. So that night, I immediately grabbed my laptop and started writing out what was the beginning of our business plan. What I wanted to do was create a lip gloss or a product, and give a portion of the profits to create a scholarship fund or something that was going to give back to my community.
At the same time, I was learning about my grandmother’s experience in residential school. Residential school (known in the U.S. as boarding school) is where Canada and the U.S. were colonized and Native, Indigenous, First peoples were living here in our tribes and communities but the settlers wanted to assimilate us into a more European way of living. They created this school system created by the church and state at the time and took Indigenous kids from their families and put them into these schools to live. In my grandmother’s case, she was taken at the age of six and put in this school until she was 16. What they learned about this school system is that it definitely wasn’t a loving experience. There was a lot of abuse happening, whether it was malnutrition, physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. A lot of these kids left this system with many scars and what we found out in most recent years is that Indigenous bodies are being dug up around these school properties. In Canada and the U.S. in the past year, thousands of children’s bodies are being found. Indigenous people have always known these schools were horrible but now the rest of the world can see this. These aren’t stories that we’re making up and my grandmother lived through that.
What I learned from my journey getting into the beauty industry was that her experience was known as generational or transgenerational trauma. What she experienced was passed on to my father and my aunties and uncles which was ultimately passed on to me and my siblings and my cousins. And our experience is not unique to us as Indigenous people. It is actually quite common to many Indigenous families, this story of passed on pain and trauma. The healing process takes a really long time.
After learning about that, I realized I had the ability to create change, not only for myself, but also be a part of creating a new narrative. What we went through was awful and horrific, but I want to do with a beauty brand is create a place where Indigenous kids feel seen. What I noticed about the beauty industry is it really did leave out Indigenous faces. There was no brand that existed that represented Indigenous kids so our mission and vision is to help every Indigenous kid on the planet see and feel their value in the world.
SHEER: What was the launch process like for Cheekbone Beauty and what inspired the name?
JH: The learning process took quite a while, as you can imagine, in an industry where I was learning so much. The name came about nine months after I had the idea. I wanted a word that people would remember and apparently words with a “K” sound are more memorable which I discovered in some research. I was driving and thought I love cheekbones, it’s one of my favorite features on any human, and Indigenous people are known for having higher cheekbones. After more research, I learned people with higher cheekbones are perceived as more trustworthy so I thought creating a new brand requires trust from customers and your community. Then the journey to make the products began and we wanted them to be vegan, sustainable, and clean. That’s taken a really long time and we’re still on the journey of sustainability.
“What I noticed about the beauty industry is it really did leave out Indigenous faces. There was no brand that existed that represented Indigenous kids so our mission and vision is to help every Indigenous kid on the planet see and feel their value in the world.”
SHEER: How do you ensure Cheekbone Beauty is sustainable?
JH: Partners we’ve worked with earlier on were not transparent about anything. We’d ask about supply chain and sourcing and they would never give an answer which I found very shocking and frightening as a consumer that we have no idea where products are coming from. It’s an easy industry to enter if you’re just trying to sell another product. The real work came when we wanted to be sustainable. How do you prove that? Every brand has to collect receipts and have information about supply chain and sourcing that they can bring back to their customers. We ‘re working on becoming a B Corp certified company. B Corp is a 3rd party organization that is literally auditing the steps for every product you sell. Even how much your employees are being paid. We pay our employees a livable wage above the minimum wage of the region they’re in.
There’s no endpoint with sustainability. It’s always going to be a journey. There’s no silver bullet or right solution. When we recreated all of our formulations and redesigned our packaging we looked at every step along the way. For us this meant removing things like black plastic and really understanding the recycling industry. For example, only about 8% of what we think gets recycled actually gets recycled. So we really want to be a place where the community can get educated about how to properly choose products and packaging to be more sustainable. It’s all very complex and nuanced.
“There’s no endpoint with sustainability. It’s always going to be a journey. There’s no silver bullet or right solution. When we recreated all of our formulations and redesigned our packaging we looked at every step along the way. For us this meant removing things like black plastic and really understanding the recycling industry.”
SHEER: What are the most popular products on your site currently and what are their most effective qualities?
JH: It’s so hard to pick one product because I really love them all but our mascara was a new product for us. People have been asking about it for years and we finally launched it this past September. We only entered the eye category because of the pandemic. We were selling mostly lipsticks in March 2020 and just launched our first Sustain product. I was literally freaking out because we spent so much money on this new product that no one would wear because they’re wearing masks, but thankfully our community is amazing and still bought lipstick. And people are still having meetings on Zoom, but I wanted to push on eye products more.
I’ve always struggled with itchy eyes: eyeliner, eyeshadow, and mascara. After a few hours I would want to scratch my eyeballs out from an allergy. So what can we make that won’t cause any of those issues which is what inspired our Sustain eye products: products that would remove allergens. And when you wash it off you don’t lose your lashes. One of the main ingredients in the product is castor oil so I feel like my lashes are getting thicker. It’s everything in one: a nice lengthening mascara but also thickening the lashes for a two-in-one effect.
I love our complexion pencils, our first step into the complexion arena. But we’ve said to our community we’re not launching 40 shades like Fenty. We’re just not there yet, but give us some time. It was a test of the market by launching nine shades: three that fell under the fair category, three under medium, and three under deep. This is just our start and we want to see if our community would like these products. Even with nine shades, they’re so easy to use and blendable to find the perfect shade. It does all the work of contouring, concealing, shading and they come in sustainable wood housing packaging. The only plastic piece is the clear cap which can be recycled. It’s truly an incredible sustainable product.
SHEER: What led to your partnership with Sephora and what impact has this had on your mission?
JH: So far, we’ve only sold with Sephora Canada. We have been working with Sephora USA and a deal is very close. They love our brand and everything we’re doing so we’re working towards being available on Sephora.com and we’re currently available in nine Sephora Canada stores. It’s been a wonderful experience. Corporations often get a bad wrap because they’re big, but the people we’ve worked with directly from their executive teams have been amazing. And the people we’ve been working with at Sephora USA are in the clean category and they’ve been so helpful. They’ve been consultants to us and really love the brand and want to help us and see us succeed.
There’s a lot of work to be done, but the good organizations realize from a business perspective that the public wants POC brands available so give the people what they want. Sephora does a good job of listening to what the community wants from them and really listening.
“ If you have that passion, that fire in your belly that wakes you up every night, like you would go to the ends of the Earth to do this thing. If that’s there, then keep going and keep fighting. It’s that passion that your community and the people around what you’re building are waiting to see. And you have that gift you have to share with the world. As long as you don’t give up, it will not fail. ”
SHEER: How is your brand helping to empower Indigenous communities outside of beauty?
JH: This is my favorite part about what we do. Through cash and in-kind donations, we’ve donated over $150,000 to organizations that support indigenous youth and environmental causes including the Navajo Water Project. Two years ago we got to provide a Navajo family with clean drinking water and solar power. People don’t often know our communities don’t have access to clean drinking water and that’s throughout North America. Also, we’re planting trees with an organization called One Planted Tree. And I get messages and emails and DMs from Indigenous youth that are excited that a brand like ours exists in spaces like Sephora where they can see themselves. If you don’t see people like you represented, how are you supposed to believe that next best thing is possible for you? The more of us that get to create avenues where kids feel seen matters. They need to see themselves somewhere in mainstream media.
In Canada, we won a competition called the Idea Competition from Bell Media (Canada’s largest media company) and the prize was a million dollars in media spend. There were billboards and TV commercials across the country with our ads all over them. I was blown away, and when I thought about being a little girl taking the bus from St. Catharines to go visit my dad who lived in Toronto in public housing, while driving down the main highway going into Toronto I never saw Indigenous people on billboards. That just didn’t happen. How powerful to see six Indigenous faces on these digital billboards. I’m really proud of the work our team did and the creative agency that helped make this possible. And to all of the Indigenous kids who saw themselves, I really hope we helped them with that.
“I want Cheekbone Beauty on every shelf around the world. So if I was an Indigenous kid in Japan, or Africa, or Australia, or South America I would see a brand another Indigenous person built and know I can do it. Indigenous kids need more examples of big builds.”
SHEER: What advice do you have for women looking to embark on their own entrepreneurial journeys especially during such challenging times?
JH: I love when people are honest and say this is really hard. But if you have passion about an idea just keep going. You know it’s going to be hard but it’s so worth it. If you have that passion, that fire in your belly that wakes you up every night, like you would go to the ends of the Earth to do this thing. If that’s there, then keep going and keep fighting. It’s that passion that your community and the people around what you’re building are waiting to see. And you have that gift you have to share with the world. As long as you don’t give up, it will not fail.
SHEER: Where would you like to see Cheekbone Beauty in the future?
JH: I love this question because I’ve always been like go big or go home haha. From the beginning, Sephora has always been our dream partnership because of their global footprint. Our mission is to have every Indigenous kid see themselves in a brand. I want Cheekbone Beauty on every shelf around the world. So if I was an Indigenous kid in Japan, or Africa, or Australia, or South America I would see a brand another Indigenous person built and know I can do it. Indigenous kids need more examples of big builds.
Photography by Dana White
Nada Esmaeel’s work is alive and vibrant, rich in detail and color. In addition to paintings, illustrations and animations, she has also designed 3D gaming environments where woven rugs hang from the walls and colored lanterns are strung across an intimate courtyard. But in each of these varied mediums, the subject is almost always Palestinian people and their culture.