By the time she was at college, saving money to order Melanie Mills Glow products from LA, the foundations of her approach were already in place: skin first always, then color placed where it would do the most to accentuate features. “Everything just naturally sits here anyway,” she says. “I practiced on myself first.” She developed the three-step process for blush: cream to map, powder to set, a final layer of translucent setting powder to build intensity. Her client roster speaks for itself: Raye, SZA, Viola Davis, Kelly Rowland, and Adut Akech, to name a few.
Her influence has reached further than she could have imagined. She describes watching a video recently of a young Black woman applying bold blush and crediting Esther with giving her the confidence to do so, after years of being told the look made her appear clownish. “She fully credited that to me,” Edeme says. “I just started crying.” The woman in the video had decided she liked it and kept doing it regardless of what anyone said. For Edeme, that’s the whole point.
Like Edeme, who moved from Nigeria to the UK when she was younger, I moved from Ghana to a city in the UK where my brother and I were the only Black kids in the school. I was made to feel ugly, and I didn’t fit in. When I started teaching myself makeup at 17, blush felt like a risk; something that would draw attention to a face I had already been told wasn’t good enough. I wore it tentatively at first, then with more conviction. Now, I’m proud to be known for my blush blindness.
Mine is the story of so many Black women, which perhaps explains why, when the controversy broke, so many of us rose up to defend her. Edeme’s influence on beauty culture has given us so much to protect.
There is a strange final stage to influence: when something you popularize becomes so well-known that it’s bigger than you. Edeme is careful to stress that influencers play an important role in introducing looks to new audiences, but her hope is that the industry becomes as quick to celebrate the artists who create as it is to celebrate those who spread. At the end of the day, recognition isn’t just a nicety. It’s how we make sure the people shaping beauty’s visual language are credited (and, ideally, compensated) for their work.
This week, many people have posted in support of Edeme, often without mentioning the ongoing discourse at all: Creators have been sharing videos of themselves “trying Painted by Esther’s iconic blush technique” and MAC Cosmetics published a shoot featuring Olandria wearing the brand’s blush alongside makeup tips from Edeme. Overall, Edeme does feel like the industry, including mainstream media outlets, have done a decent job in giving her her flowers. She adds, however, with characteristic directness: “I think they could do better.”
In the meantime, she’s getting on with it. “My mission before I leave this earth is to spread my gifts,” she says. She describes her goals for what’s next with the same unhurried confidence that seems to animate everything she does: workshops that feel like a party, complete with cocktails and a community of women learning together and lifting each other up. In time, she’d love a creative director role at a brand.
