Uoma Beauty's Sharon Chuter Launches the Make It Black Campaign at Ulta

• Sharon Chuter and Pull Up For Change have teamed up with nine beauty brands to launch the Make It Black campaign at Ulta Beauty.
• The campaign is set to raise funds for the Pull Up For Change Impact Fund, which provides financial support to emerging Black founders.
• The campaign's collection includes an assortment of limited-edition all-black best-sellers from beloved beauty brands. All profits go to the Impact Fund.

Sharon Chuter, CEO and founder of Uoma Beauty, has been working diligently to bring awareness to corporate biases and create opportunities for Black founders and employees within the beauty space. Last June, Chuter challenged companies to release the demographics of their workplaces with the rollout of her revolutionary #PullUpForChange initiative. In her latest campaign launching February 5, Chuter and Pull Up For Change are moving the needle even further by teaming up with nine beauty brands for the Make It Black campaign.

In partnership with Briogeo, Colourpop, Dragun Beauty, Flower Beauty, Maybelline, Morphe, Nyx, Pür, and Uoma, a limited-edition collection of all-black iconic products are available online through the month of February at Ulta.com and MakeItBlack.org. "This campaign brings incredible beauty brands together to amplify and celebrate Black voices, which we are incredibly committed to at Ulta Beauty," says the retailer's president, Dave Kimbell. "We are proud to offer our guests a curated, limited-edition assortment that can spark a powerful dialogue, help shift perceptions, and very importantly, accelerate future beauty leaders’ on their journeys."

One hundred percent of the profits from the collection will go towards the Pull Up For Change Impact Fund, which will provide grants ranging from $25,000-$100,000 to emerging Black founders. While there are plenty of mentorship programs for Black would-be entrepreneurs, Chuter explains that access to funding is extremely scarce. The whole process of the Impact Fund will involve extreme transparency. For starters, business pitches drafted by applicants will be posted on the Make It Black Instagram page to allow for voting by the public.

In conjunction with the launch, Chuter has also released a call-to-action to Merriam Webster urging the omission of negative definitions and synonyms as it relates to the word Black within the dictionary. In an open letter and petition, she outlines the detrimental impact that the negative connotations embody: "Language plays a critical role in how we perceive the world. Language should be neutral, unbiased and reflective of our current realities," writes Chuter. "It is in this regard that the dictionary has work to do."

Her goal is for Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries to replace the derogatory associations of Black with positive, modern takes: "Black is synonymous with luxury, it is considered timeliness and classic (the little black dress), it is formal (black tie event)."