Cheekbone Beauty is one of our favourite makeup brands for good reason: the Indigenous-owned company has been a leader in sustainability with their eco-friendly packaging and cruelty-free ingredients. Now, the brand is addressing another sustainability issue — the water crisis that’s affecting Indigenous communities across Canada — with a series of unsellable, toxic lip glosses.
The water crisis-inspired lip glosses have eye-opening names such as Luscious Lead, E.Coli Kiss and Mercury Shimmer
With June being Indigenous History Month, the campaign #GlossedOver addresses how water, a basic human right, is often contaminated, unsafe to drink or inaccessible in almost 30 Indigenous communities. While the water crisis-inspired lip glosses aren’t actually real or for sale, they have eye-opening names such as Luscious Lead, E.Coli Kiss and Mercury Shimmer — all contaminants that cause health problems — to show how dire the drinking water crisis is.
Related: The best Indigenous beauty brands to keep in your makeup bag.
“It’s time to stop glossing over this issue,” Jenn Harper, founder and CEO of Cheekbone Beauty said in a press release. “Everyone should have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s why #GlossedOver is so important: you wouldn’t put a contaminated gloss on your lips, so why should anyone put contaminated water to theirs?”
During June, Sephora Canada will donate all proceeds from the sale of Cheekbone Beauty products to Water First, an organization which helps to provide Indigenous communities with safe, clean drinking water and offers opportunities for education and training for Indigenous youth.
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