Eadem is a beauty brand pioneering Smart Melanin Beauty — our products combine science-backed ingredients and heritage botanicals to effectively and gently care for skin of color.
Eadem is about us, women of color, telling our stories, on our own terms, through the lens of beauty.
Most brand origin stories begin similarly: with a personal need, an opportunity, and a go-getter entrepreneur who sets out to build it for themselves.
And while that’s true for Eadem, in many ways, our story begins with friendship.
Marie was born in Côte d’Ivoire and grew up in France. Alice was born in America, after her parents immigrated from Taiwan. Though we look different and grew up within different cultures and countries, in each other we found respite from a limiting world and a shared perspective.
We bonded over colorism, how it was embedded within our families and our cultures. We obsessed over the lack of beauty products that were formulated with our needs — our hair, our melanin — in mind. We grew up considering ourselves the minority, when in fact we — and all women of color (WOC) — are the global majority.
Billions of us across the world, whether Black, Indigenous, Asian, Hispanic and Latino, individuals from Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, have more in common than meets the eye.
We built Eadem for this majority, for us.
We’re not about specific races or subcultures. Instead we’re here to celebrate the unique perspectives and specific needs of WOC. Biologically, we have more melanin, which dictates how our skin reacts to the environment, inflammation, and irritation. Culturally, though we have different backgrounds and appearances, we share invisible bonds that bind us together. These bonds define our daily existence. They encapsulate our common experience and range from “[insert your ethnicity] all look the same” to family expectations that we ought to be doctors, lawyers or [insert other professional worker] — regardless of the myriad of paths we wish to pursue as individuals.
In a world that loves binaries and check boxes, we don’t have to be either/or. Meaning we don’t have to be Westernized or [insert your ethnicity here]; beautiful or dark skinned; speak up for ourselves or be good daughters. There’s plenty of room for ands. We can be a modern woman of color and still hold onto our cultural heritages.
Eadem offers no definitions or ideals of beauty. We exist to showcase our stories, celebrate our unique backgrounds, and the diversity of our heritages. We’re about granting everyone the freedom to explore and understand beauty on our own terms, defined by each of us, individually. Because to us, that’s what being a woman of color is all about: embracing ourselves, exactly as we are.
— Marie Kouadio Amouzame & Alice Lin Glover
