Diarrha N’Diaye is a data-driven beauty marketer turned founder of future beauty brand, Ami Colé. She is trailblazing in the beauty space with her clean beauty and skincare brand designed for Black women – celebrating melanin-rich skin.
N’Diaye honed her beauty skills working at L’Oréal, Teen Vogue, and Glossier before deciding to start her own company. Ami Colé is comprised of three products, all filled with nourishing Baobab seed extract: the Skin-Enhancing Tint, a dewy, hibiscus-infused tinted foundation moisturizer; the Lip Treatment Oil, a cushiony gloss whose buttery softness makes you want to keep applying it; and their Light-Catching Highlighter, a balmy, clear formula that livens up the highpoints of the face.
The former social media strategist for L’Oréal and product development staffer at Glossier has said she grew tired of feeling tokenized at work and like an “afterthought” as a dark-skin Black woman and “beauty junkie” who could never find makeup shades that worked for her. That’s why she started Ami Colé. Named after her mother, the brand draws inspiration from N’Diaye’s Senagalese roots and her personal obsession with all things skin care.
“Beauty is all about perspective,” she says. “It’s all about what you feel is best for you and not about what others think that is.”
N’Diaye took her eight years of past experience and dreamt up the concept of Ami Colé to compete with today’s most popular makeup brands that fail to cater to the needs of Black skin.
“Ami Colé is about discovering, defining, celebrating, and exploring the excellence of those with melanin-rich skin and using nourishing, non-toxic ingredients like our hero Baobab Seed Oil extract – native to Sub-Saharan Africa and known to strengthen, soften and nourish our skin cells. Ami Colé exists to sharpen the focus on those who have been in the peripheral of beauty’s global narrative for centuries”, she says.
N’Diaye wants to use her platform as a way to educate those who are interested in beauty but may not have the resources to explore it. “I think there’s an educational point to it. There is a ‘showing the work’ component to it. There is a community work point to it. Many brands ‘for us’ don’t talk about the process, but I’m bringing the community along with me. It’s never just about me. It’s really about the women who have been on this journey along with me. Beauty is a language.”
