“Never in a million years did I think that I would receive multiple packages of beauty products per day and have a hard time giving away the heaps of excess I was collecting,” content creator and founder of Beauty Access Isan Elba tells ESSENCE. From “blind gifting” to over-the-top PR packages, the beauty industry is known for their more is more approach to products, banking on overconsumption to get more clicks on what they’re selling.
According to Business Waste UK, around 120 billion pieces of beauty packages are disposed of every year. Terms like “unboxing” and “haul” have been growing in popularity since as early as 2006, and today, viral influencers are building platforms testing products they hate or may never use again. So, as a solution to over 20 years of the industry’s spending addiction, Elba turned her social initiative addressing beauty’s excess, Beauty Access, into a donation drive.
This week, Beauty Access hosted the Beauty Access Café, a one-day pop-up powered by Haus Labs by Lady Gaga, in New York’s Lower East Side. As her second donation event, the café—which offered complimentary pastries from a Cloudy Donut, a local Black-owned donut shop—featured over 1,000 unopened beauty products. Think: everything from skin, hair, and hygiene products—gifted by the local community, then redistributed to the Lower East Side Girls Club, an organization supporting the city’s youth.
“Perfectly good products are consistently going to waste because not many are willing to make a solution to solve that,” Elba says. “It feels like a no-brainer to me that these products should be in the hands of people who could have a need for them.”
Last October, she hosted her first event, where 25 teens were invited to grab all the beauty products they wanted off of a wall of over 400. While many high schoolers are growing up on the internet, “I had mixed feelings about encouraging them to pursue content careers without exploring all options within the industry,” she says, introducing fields that don’t rely on overconsumption. “I concluded the event with a panel of industry professionals that make my job possible.”
With her events so far centered around educating and serving the youth, her vision for the future of beauty is grounded in sustainability and inclusivity, which she’s trying to instill in the community while they’re young. “I always joke that Beauty Access created itself but in all honesty,” she says, “it really did.”
