Black Men Are Done Borrowing Her Skincare. These Founders Built Their Own.
THE MEN’S BEAUTY REPORT
Men are moving past the “for men” aisle, and four Black founders have spent years building the routine they were looking for.
By Black Beauty Founders Staff
Check the bathroom counter in almost any home and the story tells itself. His face wash came from her side of the sink. So did the moisturizer, and the body oil he swears by. Men have been living inside a routine that was never built for them.
Now the numbers say what the counter already knew. On October 30, NielsenIQ released The Permission Gap, a global report on male beauty. It found that 36% of men say looking their best matters more to them than it did five years ago, and 54% say the same about aging well.
But men are not always reaching for products with “for men” on the label. NielsenIQ found that brands marketed specifically to men grew 3% over the year ending May 2026, while beauty and personal care overall grew 7%. Across ten Western European markets, skincare made for all genders grew 7% while male-targeted skincare stayed flat. Men want the routine. They have just been shopping around the men’s aisle to find it.
The spending is real. NielsenIQ puts U.S. men’s grooming sales at $7.1 billion, up 6.9%, with online sales up 27.6%, and Mintel found that 68% of Gen Z men used facial skincare in 2024, up from 42% just two years earlier.
Pop culture caught up this summer, when A$AP Rocky put his stamp on Fenty Skin’s Hydra Vizor SPF moisturizer. But Black founders saw this man coming years ago.
For Black men, skincare has never been one size fits all. Dark spots, razor bumps, ashy skin and sunscreen that leaves a white cast are everyday realities. Dujon Smith, Calvin Quallis, Ron Robinson and Darrell Spencer built for exactly that man. Here is his routine, from SPF to scent.
The SPF: Dujon Smith, My Block Skin
Sun protection is the step men skip most, and no founder speaks to it more personally than Dujon Smith. His family is from Jamaica, where Bob Marley’s death from melanoma is still felt, and the numbers stopped him: Black men have a five-year melanoma survival rate of 51.7%, compared with 75.1% for white men.
“I don’t want us to continue to die from things that we don’t need to die from,” he told BBF.
He launched My Block Skin on Juneteenth 2023 with clear gel sunscreens made to disappear on every shade. It became the first Black-owned sun care brand in the 175-year history of Boots, and today it sits in 405 Boots stores. The lineup keeps it simple: Clear Coat Face SPF 50 ($19), Clear Coat Body SPF 50 ($23), Clear Coat Crème SPF 30 ($23) and Clear Coat Lip Balm SPF 15 ($5).
The Face: Calvin Quallis, Scotch Porter
Calvin Quallis built his brand the way a lot of Black men learned grooming: in the barbershop. He left his corporate job, opened a barbershop following in his mother’s footsteps, and started making products in his kitchen. “Beards have staying power,” Quallis has said, and the brand has since grown from beard care into face, hair and body.
Today Scotch Porter is carried at Target, Walmart, CVS, Macy’s and Amazon. Its Face Care Collection pairs the Restoring Face Wash and the Exfoliating Beard and Face Wash with the Moisture Defend Face Lotion, made with turmeric, peony and meadowsweet. The brand’s advice is one every man can follow: moisturize twice a day, after you cleanse.
The Serum: Ron Robinson, BeautyStat
Between the wash and the SPF sits the step most men skip, and it is the one Ron Robinson has spent his career perfecting. A cosmetic chemist with more than 30 years in the lab, Robinson developed products at Estée Lauder, Avon and Lancôme before launching BeautyStat, first as a beauty blog in 2009 and then as his own skincare brand.
His hero product, the Universal C Skin Refiner, was the first stabilized 20 percent pure vitamin C serum on the market, made to brighten, firm and fade dark spots without breaking down in the bottle. It was never made “for men,” and that is exactly the point. “Our skin, we have more in common than we think,” Robinson has said. “The only difference is our level of melanin.”
On TikTok, the serum has become a fan favorite, a title BeautyStat now wears proudly on its own product page, and Oprah Daily has called it the Rolls-Royce of serums. In the brand’s clinical testing, 72% of users saw an improvement in hyperpigmentation after four weeks, the exact concern so many Black men bring to the mirror. It now comes in a larger 50 ml tube.
The Finish: Darrell Spencer, Crowned Skin
Then comes the part of the routine men actually look forward to: scent. Darrell Spencer spent years in digital ad sales at Meta, LinkedIn and Google before asking a simple question: why should men need a lotion, a body butter and a cologne to get both soft skin and scent? His answer was Crowned Skin, launched in 2024 with body butter colognes that moisturize and scent in one step.
The brand has done eight figures in revenue, became the first Black male-founded personal care brand to reach No. 2 on TikTok Shop and landed a Shark Tank deal. TikTok is still where Crowned Skin moves fastest. In July, Spencer launched a cologne-infused body wash exclusively on TikTok Shop and introduced it to customers on TikTok LIVE. It is the first step in what the brand calls its Scentmaxxing ritual: wash, body oil, body butter, then eau de parfum.
“Men are more intentional with what they put on their skin. It isn’t that they don’t care. They just need products that resonate with them.”
Darrell Spencer, founder of Crowned Skin
The Routine, Covered
Put it together and a full routine takes shape: a Scotch Porter wash, a BeautyStat vitamin C serum, My Block Skin SPF and a Crowned Skin finish. Every step comes from a founder who understands the skin it was made for.
For years, men borrowed the routine from her side of the sink. Dujon, Calvin, Ron and Darrell built one of their own.
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