Inside The Black Beauty Club’s Inaugural Black Beauty Global Forum in Brooklyn
Tomi Talabi gathered 80 founders, executives, investors and creators at The Lighthouse to ask the question Black beauty can no longer avoid: who owns the value we create?
By Black Beauty Founders Staff
On Thursday, October 16, the most important conversation in Black beauty moved to Brooklyn, and Tomi Talabi set the table. The founder of The Black Beauty Club convened the inaugural Black Beauty Global Forum at The Lighthouse, bringing together 80 founders, executives, investors, technologists, creators, journalists, artists and cultural leaders from North America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.
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There were five conversations, with one question running underneath all of them: who participates in the economic value created by Black beauty and Black culture? Talabi has been asking that question for years. This week she gave it a stage, a guest list and an agenda built to answer it.
A Room Built With Intention
The room looked the part. Guests arrived to a white wall framed in cascading greenery, moss and white blooms, with The Black Beauty Club’s signature profile silhouette glowing at its center. Inside the theater, a curved sofa, warm bands of light and fresh florals made every panel feel closer to a salon than a conference.
Talabi, a BBF Power Player, is a cultural strategist named to the Vogue Business 100 and Ulta Beauty’s MUSE 100. Raised between Nigeria, Ghana, New York and West London, she has built The Black Beauty Club into a beauty intelligence and cultural platform that tracks where beauty culture is headed, gathers the people moving it, and turns what it learns into strategy, commercial opportunity and institutional power.
Her events have always favored the right people over the most people. Her Beauty on the Block marketplace drew more than 4,000 people to 125th Street in Harlem, where more than 20 Black-founded brands did six figures in six hours, and more than 1,500 to Chicago alongside the Chicago Sky. The Forum took that same instinct indoors and pointed it at the boardroom.
The Global Black Beauty Economy
Talabi opened the day herself, introducing The Global Black Beauty Economy with Sochima Mbadugha, President of Topicals; Subuola Oyeleye, Founder and CEO of Beauty Hut Africa; Dr. Nicole Ellis, Program Manager at NielsenIQ; and Christal Alert, Founder and CEO of Tonal Cosmetics. Amina Colter-Jones, U.S. Head of Multicultural and Atlanta Market Leader at Edelman, moderated.
The panel pushed the industry to rethink how it counts the Black beauty consumer. Ellis pointed to a U.S. Black population of 48.4 million spanning immigrant, multiracial, Caribbean, and Hispanic or Latino identities, and noted that Brazil alone has more than 112 million people who identify as Black or mixed race. The case was for a sharper commercial lens built on shared needs across skin, hair texture, climate and product concerns, with Latin America and the Caribbean treated as major consumer markets and real sources of innovation.
Black Hair’s Innovation Era
Next came Black Hair’s Innovation Era, moderated by The Black Beauty Club’s Utibe Mbagwu, with Candace Mitchell, Co-Founder and CEO of MYAVANA; Vernon François, Creative Engineer and Celebrity Hairstylist; and Yinka Ogunbiyi, Founder and CEO of Halo. Black hair showed up here as a full technology category spanning hardware, AI, diagnostics, data and intellectual property.
The Halo Braid can take an eight-hour braiding appointment down to roughly four hours, and it took about 700 prototypes to get there. MYAVANA has analyzed more than 2 billion hair strands and built more than 972 Hair IDs to power more precise diagnostics. Decades of Black hair expertise, the panel made clear, are becoming proprietary technology and a brand new investment category.
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The Creator Paradox
The Creator Paradox: Cultural Relevance vs. Commercial Risk brought together French creator Fatou N’Diaye, creator and entrepreneur Eni Popoola, and creator and activist Nimay Ndolo, with Tashira Halyard, creator of Politics & Fashion, moderating. The panel unpacked the pull between the cultural relevance brands want from creators and the commercial pressure that can come with it, as audiences watch more closely which companies creators work with and whether their values match their deals.
Joining from Paris, N’Diaye described how the U.S. pullback from DEI is reaching Black creators in France, reshaping casting, campaigns and paid opportunities far beyond the American market.
When Beauty Meets Culture: Sport
When Beauty Meets Culture: Sport put award-winning sports journalist Cari Champion and Cha Spruce, Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy, in conversation with journalist and researcher Tamara Pridgett. Against a global sports sponsorship market estimated at $105.5 billion in 2024 and projected to approach $190 billion by 2030, the panel explored beauty as a growing way into women’s sport through hair, makeup, style, athlete identity and fan culture.
The heart of it was ownership: how the Black women athletes who helped build the cultural and commercial value of leagues like the WNBA can share in that value through long-term partnerships, business creation and equity.
Black Beauty, Artistry and Global Influence
YSL Beauté closed the Forum with Black Beauty, Artistry and Global Influence, part conversation, part live artistry and part product experience. YSL National Artist J. Brandon Correa led the artistry, joined by journalist Maya Allen and Aubrey Maslen, Vice President of DEI Communications and Partnerships at L’Oréal, with award-winning journalist Kayla Greaves moderating.
Guests enjoyed shade matching, guided application and one-on-one time with YSL beauty experts, while the conversation turned to authorship, credit and cultural origin, and how ideas born in the artist’s chair travel into global beauty culture.
What the Forum Revealed
Black beauty is becoming an infrastructure conversation. Data, capital, technology, distribution and ownership increasingly decide where value lands.
Black expertise is becoming proprietary value. Hair knowledge is turning into technology and IP, and cultural intelligence is driving beauty, media and sport.
Economic participation is the defining question. Across founders, creators, athletes and artists, the Forum kept returning to who owns, who decides and who shares in the value.
The Black Beauty Club is following the Forum with an individual intelligence briefing from each conversation, complete with expanded analysis, supporting data and additional commentary from the speakers.
Our Take
That defining question belongs to Talabi, and it has for a long time. She has built a career on making sure the people who create culture are recognized as the source of it. In Brooklyn, she put that conviction in front of the brands, investors and executives who can act on it.
The industry has spent years drawing from Black beauty. On October 16, Tomi Talabi made sure the people who built it had the floor.
Scenes From the Forum
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