Nude is the new beige.
A flesh-tone movement is taking shape in the $77 billion lingerie industry, which has largely ignored women of color when it comes to matching their skin tones.
Enter several startups, including Big Apple-based Naja.co and Nudz, that have not only started selling hues for darker-skinned women this week — but will also unveil colors for fair-skinned white women.
“You can’t attack Victoria’s Secret head on,” said Lingerie Addict founder and Editor Cora Harrington. “But smaller companies can capitalize on these spaces that others are neglecting.”
The trend is a long time coming.
In 2012, a social-media campaign, “What’s your Nude,” meant to shine a spotlight on an industry that offered products in just brown and black for black and Latino women.
Two years later, London-based Nubian Skins began selling lingerie specifically to women of color, landing in upscale department stores like Nordstrom — and proving that a market existed.
The competition has picked up to such a degree that now companies boast about which makes the most accurate color schemes.
Naja.co founder Catalina Girard, who offers seven varieties of nude, said her No. 7 nude bra is darker than the darkest one Nubian offers.
“We have a highly uncommon dark shade,” Girard said.
Nudz, meanwhile, has taken its cue from Hollywood, offering 10 varieties of nude and naming them after such stars as Lupita Nyong’o and Scarlett Johansson.
Even French shoe designer Christian Louboutin hopped on the skin-tone bandwagon a couple of years ago with his Nude Collection, which now includes seven skin tones, from “porcelain to deep chocolate to ensure every woman can meet her match.”