The beauty industry likes to say it reflects culture. In truth, it has spent decades ranking it.
In India and across much of Asia, skin-whitening products were marketed as social currency. Lighter skin was presented as employable, desirable, respectable. Darker skin was positioned as a liability. One of the most recognisable names in this category, Fair & Lovely built its legacy on this hierarchy before quietly changing its name under pressure. The branding evolved. The logic did not.
In the West, the language shifted, but the symbolism remained intact. In 2017, Dove released an advert showing a Black woman becoming a white woman after using a body wash. The backlash was immediate. The apology followed. What lingered was the reminder that beauty advertising still carries centuries of racial coding, whether brands acknowledge it or not.
These weren’t accidents. 
The real business model
Beauty doesn’t sell products. It sells correction.
Correct your skin tone. Correct your age. Correct your texture. Correct your body. The industry wraps this impulse in softer language now. “Glow.” “Radiance.” “Self-care.” But the underlying message is unchanged. You are acceptable once you improve.
Inclusivity, as practiced by most big brands, is cosmetic. Faces change. Frameworks don’t. Difference is welcomed only if it behaves, photographs well, and fits inside an existing hierarchy.
The performance of kindness
When called out, multinational brands rarely confront the system they profit from. They rename. Rephrase. Recast. They mistake visibility for accountability and kindness for integrity.
Progress becomes a campaign. Ethics become a caption. Respect becomes a tone of voice.
A different scale, a different stance
Unapologetic does not operate at that scale, and it has no interest in pretending it does.
It isn’t multinational. It isn’t heritage-washed. It isn’t trying to appeal to everyone.
It’s small. Which means it can be specific. And honest. There is no white-washing here. No pink-washing. No soft-focus messaging designed to offend no one and stand for nothing.
Unapologetic isn’t here to be kind in a market where kindness is often just branding. It’s here to be direct.
No filter, no correction
The brand doesn’t promise transformation. There is no “better you” hidden inside the bottle. No before and after. No hierarchy disguised as care. What it reflects instead is real life. Messy. Political. Unpolished. Human.
In an industry built on telling people who they should become, refusing to do so is a choice. And in beauty, choosing not to correct is still a radical act.
That’s also why we’re not afraid to call our products Hand Job, Golden Shower, or Dirty Bitch.
We don’t have investors to protect. No corporate panic about “brand safety”.
We speak the way real people speak.
If you like it, you’ll get it. If you don’t, that’s fine.
There’s always Head & Shoulders in the supermarket.
Unapologetic is real life. Unfiltered. Unpolished. Honest.