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Beauty in Every Shade

An Analysis of Diversity in the Beauty Industry
BY: EBUN SOFELA
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Diversity is the new trend taking the beauty industry by storm.

Over the last five years, the beauty industry has carried the mantle with matters related to diversity and inclusivity. There have been major strides to welcome, and represent customers along the full spectrum of skin shades, skin types, and gender identities. This movement has been driven largely by social media, beauty influencers of color, and most importantly, celebrities.

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FENTY BEAUTY PAVES THE WAY

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On September 8th 2017, Rihanna shook the entire beauty industry with the launch of Fenty Beauty. Fenty’s inclusiveness has been at the crux of the diversity movement in the beauty industry. Its foundation famously comes in 40 different shades, which was unprecedented at the time, and its marketing boasts models of all shapes and sizes. 

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THE BACKLASH AGAINST TARTE COSMETICS.

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Now, not only is it suddenly the standard for brands to formulate products that work for everyone—it’s actually expected that brands will be called out if they don’t. A perfect example is the huge backlash against

Tarte Cosmetics Shape Tape Foundation for what many on social media deemed to be "an embarrassingly small shade range." Twitter users, Instagrammers, and major YouTube beauty gurus were swift to denounce the brand. Tarte Cosmetics issued an apology, but the sales of the foundation struggled, and the product was discontinued less than a year later

THIS DATA PROJECT AIMS TO INVESTIGATE THE EXTENT TO WHICH DIVERSITY, OR THE LACK THEREOF, AFFECTS CUSTOMER PERCEPTION TO THE PRODUCT AND COMPANY ITSELF.
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i will use the data sources above to answer the following QUESTIONS:
  1. What do YouTube comments tell us about the customer reaction and perception of Fenty Beauty vs. Tarte Cosmetics foundations?

  2. Do the reviews of Fenty Beauty foundation show any relationship between customer skin tone and ratings of beauty products?

  3. Is it possible to predict whether a person will recommend Fenty Beauty foundation based on their skin tone?

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METHODOLOGY​

Tools Utilized:

  1. R for Analysis and Visualizations

  2. Webs Scraper to scrape YouTube comments

  3. R, OpenRefine, and Excel for data cleaning

  4. Sehpora Foundation Reviews Dataset found on Github

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