Brown Girl Hands Is Making space for Black Aesthetics in BEAUTY

How Hannah Harris is diversifying the beauty space, one hand at a time.

Hannah Harris' recently launched platform, Brown Girl Hands, celebrates diversity in an unexpected, but necessary way. With a client list that includes beauty giants such as Glossier, Nécessaire, and Lesse, what started as a quarantine project has now blossomed into a fully functioning photography studio.

The young photographer/college student was first inspired to create the platform after reading an article about images of Black and Brown hands being MIA from beauty blogs and brands. Within a few months, she and her team have helped to diversify the wildly popular handheld product-shot trend that so many beauty brands use to market and sell their items. During our virtual meeting, Hannah shares the brands origin story, her inspiration, her hopes for Black hands and people as a whole in the coming future.

Roti: Tell me us little bit about the origin story. What inspired you to create Brown Girl Hands?

I was back living at home due to the pandemic and my mom and I were going on our traditional [bi-weekly] nail appointment, when the restrictions were kind of first lifted. The nails I chose matched my Mango Glossier Balm Dotcoms, and my mom goes, "your nails match your balm, you should take a picture and send it to them". And I'm like, Mom, you don't just take pictures of your hands holding products and send them to Glossier; that's just not how it works. 

But something kind of about her comment stuck with me. I think it was because a few weeks earlier I had read an article called "Where Are All the Brown Hands'' by Jessica DeFino. That was kind of sitting in the back of my mind. And her comment, I think, just brought that up a thought like, I have brown hands and I take great hand photos! I was reading it like, where are all the brown hands? Why is it that social media editors can't find brown hands to post on all these accounts? 

And so I got to my high school camera and took some photos against my bathroom wall. And I was like, okay, well, these are great, but I'm not going to take up all this space in my personal account, like, people will be like what is she doing? So I made a whole new account for them and posted the photos I had taken that day, along with some hand photos that I had done in the past. I kind of named the account after the article. I didn't tell anyone. I thought it would just be a fun mood board for me. When I woke up the next morning and I had followers and all these things, I was like, wait, what's happening? In three days we ended up getting picked up by Nylon and Coverture and HypeBae! Unexpected. Just kind of [started it]on a whim, sitting at home during the pandemic, combining all these things I like to do. I used to take a photography class in high school, so it's been a really fun creative initiative.

“The content that we see online, the advertising that we consume, people who are getting reposted, and who are shown on TV, is so telling of what society values and what society thinks is important. ”

Roti: How has the original vision of the brand evolved into where it is now? 

I think my original vision was definitely like this mood board that just brought awareness to this issue. And now as we've grown, I've actually taken on brands as clients. And that's not something I ever thought l would be doing in life. But for some brands, we've shot the entire product collection because they didn't have photos with dark-skinned hands for any product. I guess I didn't really see that coming. I think when the first brand reached out to me, I didn't have an email or a website for Brown Girl Hands and my mom was like, is this a scam? Like, do people pay people for this? 

Roti: In terms of how you shoot? 

I have really supportive friends who help me with that part. Sometimes I need both my hands, so I need a photographer to take the photos. Even though I say Brown Girl Hands Studio, half the time, the photos these brands are posting, that they're so excited about, are shot in my driveway. 

We're such a small, nimble team and it's just learning how to get that quality, without the equipment. I don't think people realize we’re so small and that our photos are being taken with a piece of paper, a ladder and sunlight as lighting. It's been a fun journey to figure everything out. 

Roti: As the brand has grown, have you had any surreal moments?

I think one of the biggest pinch me moments was when Glossier reached out to me. I think that was one of the biggest moments, because to be recognized by them, I think a lot of people were like, "oh, wait, she's really like doing it". All my friends know who Glossier is, so because it was a very recognizable brand, they were like, “oh my gosh, you're on Glossier”. They were all tagging me in the comments and I think that was really surreal, because everyone could recognize them. It's a brand that everyone has heard of. 

Another big moment was probably The Glossy 50 List. At first I was like, oh, this is really cool. And then I saw I was in the diversity and inclusion category and who I was next to. It was people like Aurora James for The 15 Percent Pledge, Pull up or Shut Up and Kristen Noel Crawley for The KNC School of Beauty. I look up to these people and I was in that category with them. I think that was pretty surreal. There's no way they put me next to these people. I run like a little Instagram account and like Aurora James is out here, talking to every retailer on Earth. 

“I hope that Black women are just embraced in their entirety. I hope they don’t think that they have to change to be accepted by these brands .”

Roti: Why do you think it's important that a platform like Brown Girl Hands exists?

It's very much a niche issue. I think for a lot of people they didn't realize they needed it until they saw it; which is interesting. And it's not as visible as the whole “40 Shades” thing. I think it's really important because you could say its almost like one of the micro-aggressions of the beauty industry that gets overlooked. 

I think product photography is so prominent in the beauty industry that it's just as important as showing (diversity) on someone's face, as it is that the hands holding products are inclusive - that Brown hands can be beautiful, that Brown girls can be aesthetic. And I think that's what it really boils down to, at the end of the day. I think a lot of people don't look at Black people and think, oh, you belong in a minimal space. This is a way to combat that.

Roti: We’ve talked a lot about what it looks like, but what does true inclusivity feel like?

I think it evokes a feeling of, oh, my gosh, I'm pretty. I'm in college currently and we did this exercise in my class, which I think is a good example. As a woman, just in general, I think we all really beat ourselves up over our looks a lot and we see ourselves a lot harsher than the world sees us.  We had to pick our favorite picture of ourselves, but also, our favorite picture of a woman we thought was beautiful; like a celebrity or someone that we looked up to. So I put up a picture of me on “Zoom school” and the celeb I chose was Yara Shahidi. 

A girl in class was like, “you look like her”! By the end, I noticed that everyone chose someone that kind of looked like them. It was the hair, or the complexion, or whatever. I've loved Yara for years. She's my age so I always related to her. I realized that I love Yara so much because she looks like me and I think she's beautiful. So that in turn should make me feel beautiful. I can admire her for her beauty- even on the days when I’m struggling to see my own. And when you see that on TV, or you see that being represented, you see yourself like in that image. It's a wow moment. Its like, I can do those things as well because she's doing them too. 

Roti: What are your hopes for what inclusivity will look like in the future?

I think, in terms of what that future will look like, I hope that Black women are just embraced in their entirety. I hope they don't think that they have to change to be accepted by these brands, or fit a certain image to be accepted by these brands. The content that we see online, the advertising that we consume, people who are getting reposted, and who are shown on TV, is so telling of what society values and what society thinks is important. 

I'm currently reading a book called “Hood Feminism” by Mikki Kendall. She talks about a kind of “respectability politics” and how right now the world is only accepting of the Black women that fit their definition of what a Black woman should be. She mentions that to move forward, we have to be let go of that limiting definition. We have to be accepting of the women that don't match that definition and embrace them as well.