How Dujon Smith Built the First Black-Owned Sun Care Brand in Boots’ 175-Year History

One DM put a two-year-old Black-owned sun care brand on the shelves of a 175-year-old retailer. Now Dujon Smith holds a patent filing that could change the category for everyone.

The number that matters most in this story is one. One direct message, sent to a beauty buyer on Instagram. One phone call that followed. One yes. That single exchange is how Dujon Smith, the founder of My Block Skin, became the first Black-owned sun care brand ever carried by Boots, the largest beauty pharmacy in the UK and Ireland, in the retailer's 175-year history. The brand launched online there on Jamaican Independence Day in 2024, entered 129 stores in 2025, and sits in 405 stores today.

"If I ever write a book one day, it's gonna be In Search of One Yes," Smith says. "When you get that one yes, it can totally change the trajectory of your business."

Smith did not arrive in beauty by the usual route. By day, he is a corporate venture capitalist at Accenture, where he has spent a decade focused on enterprise tech and B2B startups. Before that came a tax accounting post at Deloitte in London, a year in Shanghai with a startup LED manufacturer, a stint at a $25 billion Los Angeles hedge fund, and a detour through his cousin's casting agency — the one behind The Bachelor and The Amazing Race. Along the way he added a law degree from Northwestern, with a focus on venture capital and entrepreneurship, and stamped his passport across 66 countries.

The travel started with music. A classically trained baritone raised in a Jamaican family that never had the means to travel, Smith earned his first trip abroad singing Carmina Burana and Mozart's Requiem across Italy. "Early on in your career you gotta say yes," he says, "'cause you never know what's out there."

He launched My Block Skin on Juneteenth 2023 with a personal mandate. His family is from Jamaica, where Bob Marley's death from melanoma remains a national wound, and the numbers stopped him cold: Black men have a five-year melanoma survival rate of just 51.7 percent, compared with 75.1 percent for white men. "We have to deal with enough as Black and brown folks in this society," he says. "I don't want us to continue to die from things that we don't need to die from."

The data behind that conviction is stark — and so is the size of the opportunity he is building toward.

That survival gap is not about biology alone — melanoma in people of color is diagnosed later, treated later, and discussed less. It is exactly the silence Smith built his company to break. His refusal from day one: no white cast. No tint. The debut product is a clear gel sunscreen with cucumber extract and aloe vera, lightweight and non-greasy, with the line priced between roughly $5 and $23, well under the $38-plus commanded by prestige competitors. Customers layer it as a primer, which is exactly the behavior he wants: sun protection as a daily ritual, not a beach-bag afterthought. "There's enough for everyone to eat," he says, crediting the Black women who paved the category before him.

The name came during a night in Brooklyn with his best friend. It is a triple play: the block, as in neighborhood. Sunblock, as in category. And the way "Black" sounds in Jamaican Patois. If you know, you know.

What separates My Block Skin from a thousand well-branded indie launches is the way its founder thinks about distribution and defensibility — like the investor he is. He launched in the UK and Ireland first, deliberately, leveraging a seat on Soho House's Global Inclusivity Board and a festival activation in London to attach a young brand to legacy credibility. A pop-up at the NFL's London Games followed, along with the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic and an ambassador deal with James Johnson, a veteran player with deep New York roots who had never done a commercial deal, filmed not on a beach but on a Harlem basketball court. Stateside, the brand sits in the NoMi Spa at the Park Hyatt Chicago and is in the middle of a US direct-to-consumer relaunch as Smith builds toward retail.

Drugstores and specialty beauty, yes — but also hotels, cruise lines, airline amenity kits, music festivals, dermatologists' offices. Everywhere people live under the sun.

Then there is the science — the part of this story the industry will be talking about for years. Sunscreen chemists have chased a fully clear mineral formula for decades; zinc oxide is famously the ingredient behind the ghostly white cast. At a Black Women in Venture Capital summit he was sponsoring on Martha's Vineyard, a chance introduction led Smith to Jason Williams, PhD, a UCLA scientist who had cracked it. When he saw a vial of 20 percent zinc oxide sitting completely clear on deep ebony skin, he flew to Los Angeles to see it in person, brought Williams on as chief science officer, and filed a patent. The company took the technology public in May 2026 through the UCLA Magnify incubator.

"Those are the things that create the moat and the defensible gap for you," Smith says. Jerry Porter, the former chief innovation and R&D officer at Procter & Gamble, has joined the advisory board to steer commercialization, and L'Oréal awarded the company its 2026 Inclusive Beauty Grant. The proprietary FDA chemical formulation, developed by a team of Black women, is still to come.

His capital advice is equally contrarian. In 2025, Black founders raised a collective $942 million in venture capital, just 0.32 percent of everything deployed in the US that year. Against that math, Smith argues most beauty brands should stop pitching VCs entirely and pursue angels, family offices, and the high-net-worth individuals already in their networks. "Venture capital is probably not always the best thing for many beauty founders," he says. He is raising a seed round himself, and he is clear about the endgame: he is building My Block Skin to hold, not to exit. Forbes profiled that philosophy in August 2026, framing his network-first playbook as the "offering plate economy," a model of community capital older than Silicon Valley.

Asked which sunscreen myth he would permanently retire, Smith does not hesitate: the idea that Black people don't need sunscreen. It is the belief his entire company was built to dissolve — one clear drop at a time. His favorite moment is watching someone squeeze the gel from the bottle for the first time. "Wait, this is sunscreen?" he says, recounting the reaction. "That's the wow factor that I love."

Think back to the moment the iPhone arrived and made every flip phone feel ancient. That, he says, is what My Block Skin intends to be for sun care. On the evidence so far — one DM, one buyer, one yes at a time — bet against him at your own risk.