Karen Young, founder of OUI the People — an inclusive body-care brand designed to make you feel good in your own skin — started off last month by honoring Black women with an intimate self-care experience that Black Love Inc. had the honor of attending. We collectively meditated in the essence of our Blackness and called in abundance of what’s to come. Moments in this was clear — this was not just a skincare brand, this was a Black woman wanting the world to feel good, mentally and physically. Young’s passion for wellness is not just inspiring, but what feels like a call home to many of the products and ingredients that African-American, Caribbean, and Indigenous communities have used for centuries. Her products are rooted in just feeling good — no anti-aging promises and no gimmicks are what’s been a determining factor in her success as she raised $3 million last year in a seed round, making her one of the few Black women who’s managed to raise over $1 million in funding. What does she credit to that? That she continued to have conversations that led her to where she is.
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When discussing how OUI the People was born, the Brooklyn-born founder says it’s a mixture of her environments and her love for how rich our skin was the starting point.
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“I was born in Brooklyn but grew up in Guyana. So I think for me, there’s always a cultural imprint that is literally going to follow me for the rest of my life. It’s seen throughout every single thing that I touch and do, the way that speak, the way that I think about the world. Just growing up with this perspective of, like, I practice both Hinduism and Christianity as my family was all sorts of mixtures. The typical thing that we are still used to having in the Caribbean and African American culture to the extent that we don’t even necessarily need to explain it. And so it has impacted everything about how I see the world. And I think that it has also impacted the things that I see that are missing from the world. And for me, the big thing was I’ve really always been obsessed with body care. My family has always been obsessed with body care and really taking care of our skin, even when it was the simplest thing like my grandmother slotted me in coconut oil before, I mean, my hair was always done, my scalp was greased. Like, is this attention to the full body was always a thing.”
As Young entered adulthood, she realized that there was a void in body-care products and that in the beauty and skin world, skincare was the focus. “There’s a focus on hyper-pigmentation, dryness, unevenness, like, rough skin, like beautiful, active ingredients that were present in skincare that allowed me to elevate my routine outside of the absolute basics. And in body care, I really only found the absolute basics.” With that void in the market and the desire for vast options in body care, OUI the People has managed to fill that void in space in such a beautiful way, allowing for there to be this reminder that every part of our bodies should be tended to.
While OUI the People has a line of over 15 products, Young says her number one focus is dry skin and that her favorite product is her best-selling body gloss serum.
“’I’m always going to be super focused on dry skin, the first product that we built to address dehydrated and dry skin is the hydrating, body gloss. It’s such an incredible product but so beautifully packaged. It’s easy to use. But what I really like about it is it feels absolutely luxurious going on. Everything that kind of went into the crafting of featherweight was actually to really think about delivering true hydration to the skin. Normally, an oil doesn’t do that. And so what we developed was this kind of oil serum hybrid that actually gets into that upper layer of the skin, and it fills in the gap between the dry skin cells.”
To learn more about Karen Young and OUI the People, follow them on Instagram and purchase her award-winning products here.
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