Indie beauty conversation with VictoriaLand Beauty
28 Oct 2021 --- “Everyone regardless of ability or disability has the right to feel beauty.” That is what drives natural skin care brand VictoriaLand Beauty, which produces accessible packaging for consumers with a visual disability. We talked to the brand’s founder Victoria Watts about the inspiration behind its mission to enable people who are blind or visually impaired to experience beauty and how it is doing this, one skin care product at a time.
What inspired you to create VictoriaLand Beauty and your skin care range?
Like many indie beauty brands, the genesis of VictoriaLand Beauty started with my own personal quest to solve my major skin care concern—in this case, severe hyperpigmentation. I was covering it up with makeup but it felt so inauthentic. So I started mixing and blending my own products in my kitchen.
But, due to a life-changing event, I quickly switched gears. Shortly after launching my skin care company I learned that my fourth and youngest child, Cyrus, was born with Familial Exudative Vitreoretinopathy (FEVR), a rare hereditary disorder that affects the retina, with symptoms that include vision loss or blindness, retinal detachment, and strabismus. According to the World Health Organization, Cyrus is one of an estimated two million children in the world affected by this visual impairment.
My husband Josh and I spent hours shuttling Cyrus to doctors in the ophthalmology department at Boston Children’s Hospital in the US. Doctors there deduced that Cyrus had some peripheral vision and he could detect light thus enabling him to better adapt to his surroundings. Now an active four-year-old, Cyrus manages well. He gets around mostly with touch and sound. He swims and rides horses like many boys his age.
As I watched Cyrus navigate his unsighted world every day, I was in awe of the mind-body connection and its ability to turn Cyrus’s other senses into superpowers, particularly his sense of touch. I became determined to offer visually impaired customers the same ability to experience independence and enjoy beauty as my sighted customers.
What was missing from the skin care market that you sought to fill with VictoriaLand Beauty?
Universal skin care products made from clean and efficacious ingredients, formulated to be inclusive of all skin types and packaged to be accessible for consumers with a visual disability.
How did you approach conceptualizing and creating your skin care range?
I set out to create Victorialand Beauty because I couldn’t find a natural, simple and effective skin care solution to address my skin care challenges at the time. I spent the next few years working alongside my product developer, researching ingredients and formulating products that delivered on efficacy, simplicity and safety.
After the birth of my son with an acute visual impairment, I quickly realized how underserved the low vision and blind consumers are in the beauty industry. This audience has virtually been ignored when it comes to product accessibility.
This empowered me to make Victorialand products accessible to this audience. I spent the next two years working alongside a focus group from the Lighthouse Organization to create the CyR.U.S., a proprietary tactile recognition system of raised trademarked symbols and QR code technology to facilitate product identification, information and usage. And to change the paradigm.
What was important to you when developing your line?
- Developing universal formulas with clean/natural ingredients that work for all skin types
- Ingredient honesty and transparency
- Universally designed packaging for all abilities
Universal design means that it is for everybody. Universal Design is also based on the belief that by designing products for special needs first, design products work better for everyone else regardless of age, size, ability or disability and might, in fact, inspire new ideas that don’t ordinarily exist. And give everyone else a better experience. Think about the average person who wears glasses or contact lenses. When you are in the shower you can’t wear your glasses or contacts. Universal design benefits them.
How did you come up with the idea for raised symbols to identify your products?
When we learned about Cyrus’s visual impairment, we knew very little about blindness. My first thought was braille but, after researching brands currently using braille on packaging and reaching out to the blind community, I learned that only 10% of the low vision/blind community actually read braille. Combined with the fact that there are space restrictions on packaging, Braille is not the best solution when it comes to communicating to the visually impaired on packaged goods.
Understanding the importance of tactile marking for product identification, I decided to create a raised symbol system for my product range. The CyR.U.S. system of raised universal symbols makes product identification easier for the visually impaired, including those who cannot read Braille.
One of our raised symbols is prominently featured on each product cap. Our raised symbols are: an inverted triangle for eye and lip cream; a droplet for face oil; a crescent moon to denote night cream; and a wavy dash for the face moisturizer.
Additionally, all of our outer packaging features an embossed, tactile QR code that users can scan to listen to an auditory message that provides product descriptions, ingredient callouts and directions. We are currently developing an expanded version of the QR system named Skinopsis, a first of its kind enhanced audio description that not only describes product features and benefits as well as ingredients, but also includes background stories, ratings and reviews, and how-tos using expressive voice talents, music and sound effects. Our future plans include offering audio in different languages.
What has been the response so far from the industry and consumers?
Early on in our brand development, we did a survey among the visually impaired. We explained that VictoriaLand Beauty will feature a packaging system that will have raised symbols on both the outer and inner package to identify the product by touch. Additionally, there will be raised, scannable QR codes on the outer package that link to the brand’s website for product information and ingredient list.
One question we posed to our audience was: Would this system encourage you to buy VictoriaLand Beauty products? A resounding 82% said they would. And 72% said that this packaging feature would encourage them to switch from their current brand to VictoriaLand Beauty.
But our greatest endorsement came just last month when influencer, motivational speaker, television host and YouTuber with over two million subscribers Molly Burke (who also happens to be blind) reviewed VictoriaLand in her YouTube video. She said of VictoriaLand: "If an indie brand can do it right, every brand can do it right. Doing it right means Universal Design. When we can get every brand to use the exact same symbols, that's amazing.”
What do you hope to see in the beauty industry moving forward?
Today, many beauty brands advocate for inclusivity, gender neutrality, racial diversity and face and body positivity, beauty equality and LGBTQ+ Community. But all of these audiences live in a sight-dominated world. The visually impaired are left to make do - or do without - the beauty that we take for granted. People think just because blind/visually impaired women can’t see, they don’t care about their appearance or spend money on beauty products. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone, regardless of ability or disability, has the right to feel beauty.
VictoriaLand is not only changing the way the world sees beauty, but changing who it is for. My mission is to empower those who are blind or visually impaired to experience beauty through all of their senses.
By Natasha Spencer-Jolliffe, BPC Insights Senior Journalist