Why I put my face on a British Beauty Council campaign
I modelled for the British Beauty Council's "A Beauty Industry That Looks Like You" campaign earlier this year, and I said yes for one reason: most conversations about accessible beauty still happen without a single visibly disabled person in the room, let alone in the photograph. If the industry is going to talk about who it's built for, someone has to actually be in the picture, not just quoted in a footnote.
What the numbers actually say
The Council's DEI report, built from a census of 4,000 people working in this industry, backs up why that picture matters. Nearly 20% of the beauty workforce identifies as neurodivergent, four points above the national average. 36% of workers with physical disabilities are business owners, founders, or entrepreneurs, against a national figure of 25%. Read those two statistics together and the story is obvious: disabled and neurodivergent people aren't missing from this industry. They're already here, in numbers higher than the general population, often because they had to build their own way in.
Then the same report shows what happens next. Representation at senior management level drops by nearly 50% compared to the industry's overall presence. Only men and people who are white increased their share of director, CEO, and board seats over the period measured. Every other group, women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, neurodivergent people, went backwards. And beauty imagery and media have an underrepresentation problem the report calls longstanding, which is a polite way of saying most campaigns still don't look like the workforce making the products in them.
A need the industry hasn't caught up to
So the talent is there. The founders are there, disproportionately so. What isn't there is a leadership pipeline that keeps them, or a reliable way for a customer to tell a genuinely accessible product from one wearing the word as marketing. Plenty of brands will say "inclusive" on a landing page. Almost none can show you what that claim is actually checked against.
This is exactly why I founded Certified Accessible
Certified Accessible is the accreditation framework I built to answer that gap directly: a way to make accessibility visible, measurable, and meaningful, instead of a word brands get to self-award. It now holds a three-year strategic partnership with the British Beauty Council to help build that standard across the industry, the same industry the Council's own data says still isn't built for the people already working in it. That partnership is the practical version of what a campaign photograph can only gesture at. A picture says the industry wants to look like this. A certification framework is what makes sure a product actually is.
The actual takeaway
Human Beauty exists because I needed a mascara that didn't fight my hands. Anti-Roll™ packaging on Liquid Confidence™ Mascara and the layout of the Makeup Therapy™ Palette are what "built for" actually looks like in practice, not as a press line. Certified Accessible is that same standard, scaled up so it doesn't depend on one founder happening to have the right lived experience. The data says the need is real and already measured. The next three years are about closing it.
