Welcome to MakeUp HerStory. Here, we highlight Black women in beauty who are taking the industry by storm and making history in their own right. Everyone from rising beauty brand founders, to behind-the-scenes PR mavens discusses their career journeys, biggest inspirations, and more.
S’Able Labs, an A-beauty brand founded by Sabrina and Idris Elba, doesn’t fit into the “celebrity skincare” box. As a licensed esthetician reclaiming African ingredients (and her mother’s Somali beauty tips), Sabrina Elba has turned their brand into a space for not just the health of melanin-rich skin, but diasporic connection and creative wellness.
Here, Elba opens up to ESSENCE exclusively about how she defines creative wellness, how their ingredients are sourced, and why their brand is more than just a famous face.
The Root of Her Cause
“When I was younger, I had really bad acne,” Elba tells ESSENCE. Growing up in Vancouver, a predominately white city in Canada, “I didn’t have many friends who looked like me…that I could be like ‘why is this happening to my skin?’”
Hyperpigmentation that would fade in weeks on her friends took up to a year on Elba’s face, but it wasn’t until she was an adult did she realize skin tone played a role in skin health. “I learned what it means to have melanin-rich skin,” she says. “The more I learned the more I realized that it’s not actually me who’s the problem … [the beauty industry] sees us as a ‘niche’.”
Darker skin tones are prone to concerns other races don’t face as often, from ingrown hairs and sensitive skin, to dryness and hyperpigmentation. “If you formulate for us first, which is the most sensitive subgroup, you get product that’s better for everyone,” she says. From tyrosinase inhibitors and moisture-rich ingredients, “these are things everyone can benefit from, they just show up more on us.”
The Rise of Celebrity Skincare (and The S’Able Labs Detour)
As a licensed esthetician, Elba founded S’Able Labs, a melanin-inclusive skincare brand rooted in ancestral African rituals, with a more deep understanding of her customers’s skin than most celebrity brands. “Not only do I get to see the products firsthand on my clients, but also speak about their issues,” she says. But, still, she can’t avoid the elephant in the room: when the brand launched, there was as if a new celebrity skincare brand every week.
“To feel like you’ve made something that didn’t exist and was needed and then to feel like you were being lumped into an oversaturated space [of] ‘celebrity skincare’ was a bit frustrating,” she says, co-founding the brand with her husband, Idris Elba. “We self-funded the brand from the start, we didn’t just white label, we’re not a face to an investor, this is our brand.”
From Acne to African Beauty
With all the ingredients approved and tested by and on the founders, their latest product, the Moringa Lip Salve, took almost three years and over 80 iterations to get just right. As the single product she’d bring on a desert island (even at the cost of sunscreen), “I cannot stand my lips being dry,” she says. Before the lip salve, Elba says she was “self-conscious” about her lips, with peeling resulting in hyperpigmentation on her lips. “This is a lip salve. It’s meant to heal.”
As a first generation African, the Somali founder is leading the A-beauty charge. “My mom was mixing her turmeric and her qasil mask everyday,” she recalls growing up. Now, realizing the truth to her mother’s beauty tips, she sources those same ingredients from Africa, specifically Ghana, while humanizing the women behind her brand.
“People forget that in beauty, people can be suffering creating these products, people can be dying,” she says. “All of our supply chains are responsibly-sourced and traceable, we know the farmers we source from and that’s why we brought people to go and see them.”
While providing safe working conditions and fair wages, economic independence and land rights, S’Able Labs reclaims ingredients often appropriated by non-African brands. “We wanted to make sure every product had an A-beauty staple in the formulation,” she says, from her bestselling Okra Face Serum to her Qasil Exfoliating Mask. “We want people to relate African beauty with efficacy.”
If She Had To Choose…
(Other than the lip salve), “I do always love my toner,” she says. “I go back to it a lot.” The Black Seed Toner, with ingredients native to West Africa, is the first product in line throughout Elba’s day, with her skin relying on the vitamin C, E, and Ferulic acid. Meanwhile, “Idris loves it because it’s got AHA,” she says, which is a helpful exfoliate to use after shaving to prevent ingrown hairs.
As for her full routine? “I use my range day and night,” she says, using the Rooibos Micellar Water in the morning then double cleansing at night. In addition, she uses products S’Able Labs doesn’t have yet: the La Roche-Posay Cicaplast Balm SPF50 and the Skin Rocks by Caroline Hirons Eye Cream.
What grounds her routine, however, is good sleep, drinking water, and a grounding mat. “I have endometriosis, so I find it’s the only thing that’s actually helped with cramps,” she says. That, and infrared saunas. “I feel like it’s made my skin glow more.”
Defining Creative Wellness And The Future Of S’Able Labs
In an event this past November, Elba invited artists, musicians, poets, and other creatives, into a space to define what creative wellness means sonically. “We had great conversations, we had performances from people we respect and admire,” she says, continuing the exploration in her latest event and album, No Lip Service. “The reason we called it ’S’Able Labs’ is it was always meant to be a think tank, a place of exploration and creation,” she continues. “African beauty is rooted in oral tradition.”
An exploration translated into her podcast, Skin to Skin, Elba just wrapped the first season. “I want to learn as much as I can,” she says, which has helped her own her knowledge and overcome imposter syndrome. “The seats not always there at the table and sometimes you have to create that space for yourself,” she says. “I want A-Beauty to be a household name.”