Beauty As A Power Move
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
By Faith Binkholder
I’m Faith Binkholder, Co-Founder and CTO of Chromara, a beauty-tech company developing AI-powered foundation technology that creates custom shades on-demand. After years at Sephora witnessing systematic shade-matching failures, we're building the manufacturing infrastructure to solve the problem at its source.
We spent years watching women compromise on their foundation shade at Sephora. They'd try six options, none would match perfectly, and they'd buy the "closest" one with a disappointed "this will work." That resignation carried into how they talked about themselves. "I can never find my shade." "Nothing works for my skin tone." "I just find something close enough."
What struck us wasn't just the product failure, it was how a bad foundation match became internalized as a personal inadequacy rather than recognized as a systemic industry failure. When you can't find a product that literally matches your skin, the message you absorb is that you're the problem, not the product. That affects confidence in ways most people don't connect to beauty routines.
Personal style influences confidence because it's the daily evidence of whether you're prioritizing yourself or settling for what's available. Every morning you look in the mirror wearing foundation that oxidizes wrong or doesn't match your neck, you're reinforcing that you're not worth the perfect option. You're training yourself to accept "good enough" as the baseline. That mindset doesn't stay contained to your makeup bag. It influences how you negotiate, whether you speak up in meetings, and what opportunities you pursue.
The role beauty plays in leadership presence is often misunderstood as vanity or performance...it's neither. Leadership presence requires you to show up as the most authentic, confident version of yourself, and beauty routines are part of that foundation. When your external presentation aligns with how you see yourself, you operate from a place of congruence rather than compensation.
We've pitched enterprise partnerships to executives at billion-dollar beauty companies. My confidence in those rooms doesn't come from wearing the right shade of lipstick. It comes from knowing I've solved my own problems first. I'm not asking them to fix an issue that I'm still struggling with personally. We've built the technology that ensures that no one will ever have to settle for close enough again. That changes how I carry myself.
Beauty routines become empowerment rituals when they shift from performance to preparation. Performance-based beauty is about meeting external standards: looking professional, appearing put-together, signaling status. That's exhausting and fragile. Preparation-based beauty is about creating the conditions for you to operate at your best. It's functional, not performative.
For me, that means the difference between spending 20 minutes trying to color-correct a foundation that doesn't match versus having a foundation that works immediately. The time saved isn't the point; the mental energy saved is. When you're not managing workarounds and compensations for products that don't serve you, you have more capacity for everything else.
The beauty industry has conditioned women to accept inadequate solutions and call it empowerment. "Mix two shades." "Use color correctors." "Learn contouring to change your face shape." These aren't empowerment tactics. They're elaborate workarounds for an industry that hasn't bothered to make products that actually fit the diversity of human faces.
Real empowerment in beauty comes from refusing to accept systems designed to make you settle. It comes from recognizing that when +40% of consumers can't find their foundation shade, that's not a personal failing, it's a manufacturing failure. And it comes from building solutions, whether that's the technology we’re creating or simply the decision to stop buying products that don't serve you.
Beauty is a power move when it's on your terms, solving your actual problems, and creating space for you to show up fully rather than performing an edited version of yourself.
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