British beauty blogger Amena Khan announced that she has pulled out of L’Oreal’s latest haircare campaign, after a series of tweets in which she criticised Israel in 2014 re-surfaced.
Source: Al Jazeera – Opinion
Writer: Ruqaya Izzidien
With the latest updates about Amena Khan’s recent statement on Instagram.
Khan’s decision to step down from L’Oreal hair care campaign draw enormous criticism in supporting and denouncing her decision. In her latest statement, Khan posted a message on her Instagram page, she wrote:
“I want to particularly reach my supporters, viewers and follower who have inundated my message with positivity and compassion. I love you guys, and I know you are confused. This is for you,” she wrote.
“… I want to clarify a few points. I stand by grieve for and am outraged by the suffering of children whether they’re victim of war, or any other type of abuse. … Blanket labelling a community is easy to fall into unintentionally and it goes against everything I stand for.”
Please res her full statement here:
The L’Oreal haircare campaign, which purported to celebrate diversity, quickly made headlines for featuring the hijabi model in a hair product advertisement.
The campaign was supposed to be part of the company’s strategy to champion diversity. L’Oreal has pledged to “explore and reflect the infinite diversity of styles, habits and expressions of beauty across the world in order to effectively develop and market products most adapted to diversity”.
But L’Oreal’s leadership is seemingly oblivious to what diversity actually means. Trotting out people of colour in front of a camera is not diversity, despite what Matt Damon might think. If a company intends to value the diverse make-up of a society, then it must accept that people with different life experiences will have distinctive views.
Producing skin-whitening creams and airbrushing advertisements to the point that they have to be banned don’t really help diversity image-building efforts. And neither does suspending contracts over expression of certain political views.
Read the full story @ Al Jazeera – Opinion