Olunife Ofomata is staying true to her roots. The Nigerian-American business owner of Sweeter Juice Skin wanted to bring lathering lotions she used from her childhood to the modern American market.
Recently, Ofomata discussed the brand and its impact on the forgotten faces of melanated people.
How did you come up with the idea for Sweeter Juice Skin?
Sweeter Juice Skin is an inspiration from my upbringing, my heritage, my background and God inspired me to go ahead and move forward when I actually launched.
I’m originally from Nigeria, and so is my husband, who’s a co-founder. I have fond memories of my grandmothers, when I would go to their shop lathering me in shea butter and cocoa butter. We have a lot of indigenous ancestral remedies that just work on our skin. Those definitely inspire the ingredients that I use in the brand.
I’ve been an aesthetician for over 13 years, so I’ve also been able to work directly with my clients to know what their issues are with their skin, and there’s still a big gap in the skin industry for melanin skin, skin of color and just diverse skin, in general, that more research needs to be done. More research needs to be done on indigenous ingredients … it’s definitely been a passion of mine since I’ve been little, just to bring these type of products out to people and solve these kind of skin issues.
One of your missions is to advocate for the forgotten face. What is that?
The skin care industry, we know it’s a multibillion-dollar industry, but there’s still so much research that needs to be done for skin of color. Only 4% of dermatologists are Black people.
If you’re looking at a skin care book, you don’t see a lot of skin of color, or what the remedies for the issues would look like on us. When you get to market, first of all, there’s very few Black founders in retail stores, then you have when they actually do the research, there’s a lack of clinical trials on skin of color. What we’re trying to do at Sweeter Juice Skin is change all that, and revolutionize bringing what we know from our our ancestral past to modern-day science, and combining it with inner inner and outer beauty.
The forgotten face is people like me, people like you, people all over the world that have some melanin that have been forgotten in the skin care industry.
What does inner and outer beauty mean?
In this space right now, it’s being said to be a new revolution in skin care … when I look back at some of the ingredients we’ve been using for centuries, many of them had benefits for internal use and external use. That’s what it comes to when using a holistic approach to skin care.
