Rachel Winard On Why We Need To Queer The Beauty & Skin Care Industry

When I was making skin care just for myself for health reasons and out of necessity, I delved into all the different schools of thought that would help me formulate products that would be as effective as possible, and—this wasn't groundbreaking to me, but it was something I'd never really seen in the marketplace before—which is that skin is skin. It's not gendered. There's nothing inherently gendered about skin health. Skin health is a public health issue because your skin is your largest organ, and in order for your whole body to function at its best, your skin needs to be well taken care of and balanced and protected. So it was—I don't want to say it was a no-brainer—but it was like I didn't really envision any other way of making skin care except or for everybody. So that everyone would be able to use our products.

Well, first, I would never set foot in a Sephora. It just did not feel welcoming at all to me. None of the marketing was for somebody who presented their gender the way that I do. I like to joke—and I don't mean it in a bad way because I like the way I look—but I look like a 12-year-old boy. So I'm not really the target audience for any of these places. Up until recently, it was like hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper-feminine or like manly, all-black, smells-like-Axe-body-spray or like a forest. There was nothing in between, and neither [of these types of products] appealed to me, made sense to me, or made me feel good. There was nothing in the middle really.

And I would say there are specific things that queer people want and need in their skin care. Like if you're transitioning, you're going to need a very specific set of skin care products that will help you transition with ease. If you are genderqueer, you're going to be drawn to a very different kind of skin care regimen than if you were otherwise not. And one of the best ways to figure out what all those nuances look like is to have people at the table with a voice who represent those communities.

But yeah, beauty is very feminine, which is why oftentimes you'll see straight women and more and more gay men represented, but there are still large swathes of the population that don't get included in that pretty equally entrenched concept of what beautiful or beauty is and who gets to use it, what comes to mind when you say it. It's really tricky. These terms that have been used in one very specific way for a really long time can be hard to undo.

One thing I do is—even though I don't like being in front of the camera or having my photos taken or any of that—I will step out of my comfort zone and show up to particularly talks or presentations where I really stand out. Because I really want that visibility for someone else—like some young person who's in the Midwest who maybe doesn't see the same lovely, beautiful range of people that we do just by taking the subway in New York City everyday—to see that there's somebody who's in skin care who maybe looks a little more like them.

I think it's really lovely that I get to walk my walk every day because I don't have a boss or HR or anyone. I am the boss, and I am HR. The flip side is that I also have employees, so there are times when I'm ready to really let go full force—but I have people whose livelihoods I'm responsible for. So I do have to find that balance of (laughs) not burning the whole thing down—while still standing behind our principles. That's a deal-breaker. We will not take a step back from our ethos and our principles and the reasons why we started this company.

We get a lot of the "shut up and sell me my skin care." Any time I post anything queer, I'll lose on average like 400 or 500 followers. Without fail. One hundred percent of the time. I get a decent amount of hate mail because I am so out.

Because bullying tactics should never work. We have a little bit of a platform. We don't have a huge platform, we're not a massive company, but we have a little bit. And I'm gonna use that to make sure that other people who don't have a platform can see themselves represented in ours. I'm such a little rebel at heart. When someone tells me no, I can't do something, that's exactly what I'm gonna do.

I went to Juilliard. I was a professional violinist before this, and Juilliard was a really weird place because they were super, super, super gay-friendly—but only gay males. Like, there was a dichotomy that gay men were in front of the curtain, and lesbians were behind the curtain. That was actually one of the most homophobic places I'd ever been, specifically anti-lesbian. So I went right from out of the closet, right back in for a little while. But my personality is such that, even when I didn't have the terminology, I was never really in the closet if that makes sense. And now I would say I use lesbian, genderqueer, queer all interchangeably.

One last thing I'd like to say is if you're straight and you're an ally—or you're straight and you want to be an ally, and you don't know, and you don't want to mess up so you don't try. Just ask. Just ask. Ask any questions. That's the only way you'll ever get the opportunity to understand. And then listen. Listen to the answers.