The ALIA
Volume I. Issue XX. Jan. 5, 2021.
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the twentieth issue of The ALIA, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the lives of Asian women in America, and beyond, where we bring you the latest news and insightful conversations with industry professionals. In this volume, we feature women in fashion, media and arts. Find us on Instagram. Subscribe for free here.
Letter from the editor:
Hello! It’s so good to see you again, and a warm welcome to our new subscribers. Happy New Year! I hope you have all had a restful holiday season. It’s our first issue in the new year, and we couldn’t be more excited to usher in 2021 with you. To celebrate, we are giving away five curated items, including two exclusive to The ALIA. Details on how to enter our giveaway on our Instagram.
As our first guest of 2021, I invited Yu-Chen Shih, founder of beauty brand Orcé, to chat with us about how she founded her own cosmetics line for Asian skin and her perspective on Asian beauty standards from her experience growing up in Singapore. She had so many insightful ideas and thoughts to share. I hope the conversation continues with you beyond these pages.
We look forward to bringing you more content and continuing to empower Asian American women and beyond. I want to remind you that our 10-question feedback form is still open, and we would love nothing more than to hear from you about what you would like to see more of.
Sincerely,
Annie Lin
Founder of The ALIA
If you could like to learn more about this project, please contact us at contact@alia.news
New Years Giveaway
Click the image above or here to enter our giveaway.
Asian Creatives
Clockwise from top left: @alllisonho, @onnuk_, @lilymaymac, @__kindacool
Community News
Golden Globes • The Asian American film community was shocked and outraged by the Golden Globes decision to categorize “Minari” in the foreign-language category despite the film being about an immigrant family pursuing the American dream in America, directed and written by an Asian American and produced by American companies. Read: Reuters
K-Culture • Highsnobiety calls South Korea a “major player when it comes to fashion,” and we can’t argue with that statement. They highlight the streetwear trends shaping Korean youth culture in 2021 from unconventional and upbeat to reimagined Hanbok. Read: Highsnobiety
Jade • Modern jewelry brand Ren has caught our eye with elegant pieces reflecting the significance of jade in East Asian culture. Founder Crystal Ung said she grew up hearing stories about jade and seeing family members wear it. The brand also donates 10% of sales to Apex for Youth and Asian Youth Center. Shop responsibly. Read: Fashionista
Letters • 71 deeply personal letters written by Asian American artists about cultural identity and family pasts are compiled in a book “Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts.” The co-producer and editor, Christopher K. Ho, said the book is a response to the racism and violence aimed at Asians in North America due to COVID-19. Read: SCMP
In Conversation with Yu-Chen Shih
This week, we’re joined by Yu-Chen Shih, 28, founder of the LA-based cosmetics brand Orcé. Having felt overlooked by the beauty industry, Shih set out to create a foundation line designed especially for Asian skin tones and issues. She delves into the rigid Asian beauty standard that impacted her self-esteem growing up and the issues she faced in the advertising industry that sparked the idea for a makeup brand that represents Asians.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
What was it like growing up in Singapore and how did you tackle the East Asian beauty standard?
I was born in Taiwan but never spent a lot of time there. I grew up in Singapore. I would go back and forth with my mom and sister because we didn’t get our Singaporean permanent residency until I was a teenager. This is ancient history, but the government identified me as a gifted student, and they extended a PR to my family and me.
Growing up in Singapore and in Asia, in general, was tough for me. My dad is Malaysian and he’s from a tribe called the Melanau people from Sarawak. They are an indigenous group and share ancestry with the Austronesians and Polynesians. Naturally, my sister and I were darker-skinned and curvier than our peers. I was made fun of for my weight and skin color. Even though Singapore is an international melting pot, the beauty standard is very much East Asian – the skinner and whiter, the better. Whitening products, even today, are one of the top-selling in Singapore.
My mom is your classic, beautiful, skinny, long-legged and fair-skinned Taiwanese woman. It always bothered her how my sister and I didn’t look like her. She was always putting us on diets and skin whitening regimens. At some point, she even sent me to the dermatologist for an IV that’s suppose to whiten my skin. I grew up feeling ugly. In Asian culture, people are quick to judge other’s appearances. Totally unsolicited. One comment I heard a lot was, you would be so much prettier if you lost some weight and if your skin was lighter. The narrow standard of beauty determined the tone of my time growing up in Singapore.
How did that affect your self-esteem?
My self-esteem in Asia was pretty fragile. I was always worried about what people thought of me. I was nervous about going to gatherings or seeing people I hadn’t seen in a while because I knew they would comment on my appearance, especially my family in Taiwan. They think they’re trying to help you. In hindsight, I don’t think I would have recovered if I hadn’t moved to America.
When I was in secondary school, I developed an eating disorder, bulimia. I lost a crazy amount of weight. For the first time, people were complimenting me for my appearance. In a twisted way, I felt better about myself because I had lost weight. I was also trying hard to whiten my skin. I wouldn’t go out unless it were in the late afternoon because it was so sunny in Singapore. My self-esteem still wasn’t solid because the only way I could maintain my looks was through an unhealthy habit of an eating disorder. When I moved here, I noticed the standard of beauty in America is a lot more flexible.
How did you learn to accept yourself for who you are?
My mom was a tiger mom, and she wants us to be successful. In her mind, a woman has to look good to be successful. It comes from a good place, but she was very focused on our looks. We were an extension of her. Having a boundary with my mom helped me slowly rebuild my confidence because I didn’t hear those comments about my appearance all the time, even if it comes from a good place.
In America, people are more generous with their compliments, even to strangers. In Asia, that’s not common. You would never tell a stranger they look good. That would be considered weird. I remember a complete stranger, a middle-aged lady, stopped me and said, “Wow, you’re so beautiful. You’re gorgeous. I felt like I needed to tell you that.” My first response was, no no no, I’m not. I thought she would probably brush it off. But she stopped in her tracks and told me, “If somebody compliments you, take it because you deserve it and you are beautiful. Don’t sell yourself short. You’re beautiful the way you are.” I think that was the first time I had heard something like that. It was very new to me. I wish I could thank her. That casual interaction changed my attitude toward myself.
In college at Pepperdine University, it’s not a very diverse school, especially for Southern California. It had a small Asian student population. I was faced with a second set of challenges. All the popular girls are tall, blonde, long-legged and blue-eyed. The golden standard of beauty was once again, the opposite of me. I wanted to be accepted and tried to fit in. I joined a sorority, worst decision of my life. Pepperdine was removed from the city, and I thought a sorority would be the only way to have a social life.
When I joined the sorority, I did everything I could to distance myself from my Asian heritage. I didn’t want to be seen eating Asian food or caught listening to Asian music that I love. I was trying to whiten myself culturally. I tanned my skin and dyed my hair blonde. One day, I wanted to introduce my friend to another friend of mine. She asked me, is the friend you want to introduce to me Asian? I said yes. She told me she doesn’t want to associate with Asian people. But she’s Asian herself! In my mind, I started criticizing her for distancing herself. I felt bad she was so ashamed of her own culture. Then I caught myself realizing that I was doing the same thing, trying to change myself to feel accepted. That was the day I went home and looked at myself. Why am I doing this? Why am I bleaching my hair? Why was I trying to look like a Barbie? I love Asian food, boba and Subtle Asian Traits! That was the day I decided that they can laugh at me if they want. But I want to be myself because if I don’t like the person I’m looking at in the mirror, it doesn’t matter.
How was Orcé founded?
The birth of Orcé is intertwined with all my experiences as an Asian woman. As a lifelong beauty lover, I never felt like any brand spoke to me. I felt overlooked by the beauty industry. I started learning makeup at 11-years-old when I got my first eyeshadow palette from an aunt. It had these crazy colors of red, yellow and blue. I was putting it on anyone who would sit in a chair, and easy victims were my little cousins. One time I put blue eyeshadow on my cousin, and she started screaming when she saw herself in the mirror. My mom saw me terrorizing everyone with the eyeshadow palette and decided to send me to makeup classes with her friend.
My passion for beauty grew from there. During a time when I felt the worst about myself, I had an urge inside of me to help other women feel beautiful. Anytime a friend said they felt ugly, I would have this burning desire to sit them down and help them recognize their beauty by playing with makeup and highlighting their favorite features.
I got really into foundation because it is the basis of every look. I would go to the drugstore and department stores hunting for a foundation that works. But because of my skin color, I was never able to find a shade that matched. Especially with Japanese and Korean beauty brands, their shades were always too light. As a young girl, I looked up to these brands, magazines, TV and movies for the standard of beauty. For a brand to tell me you are outside of our range. It made me feel the need to whiten my skin to be accepted within this shade range of what is considered beautiful. That left a mark on me.
I majored in advertising and marketing in college and started working in an advertising agency in my junior year. I handled the media strategy for a major global Asian beauty brand that wanted to expand its market reach to a younger audience. Their star line of products was whitening skincare, and my question was, who is buying these whitening products? The younger generation of Asian women would rather reach for a bronzer than a whitening cream. Secondly, their advertising was only on TV and newspapers. They aren’t going to reach young people that way.
I proposed a rebranding, instead of calling it whitening to call it brightening, or create a new product line because their strategy wasn’t working in the US. I spent a long time on the proposal only to be told there’s nothing wrong with the strategy, just do what you did last year. That really crushed me. It was also an aha! moment that I wanted to create a brand to resonate with women like me who have been overlooked. We have so many choices as the younger generation of women, we have a different aesthetic, but nobody’s serving us yet. That’s how I was inspired to create Orcé.
Every day is a learning process. I’m young, and I haven’t spent 10 years at Estée Lauder. I don’t know the beauty business. I’ve had to learn from trial and error. Since working at the ad agency, I’ve had the idea, and I worked on it for my capstone marketing class at Pepperdine. That was when I started diving into the research and planning. From the idea to creating the brand took a couple of years. I launched the brand in February 2019, and it took almost two years to create the brand design and foundation formulation. By the time we launched, I had gone through three manufacturers. It was a process.
Maybe it’s the imposter syndrome in me, every time someone tells me I’m so proud of you. I think about how I haven’t broken even yet, and I’m still operating at a loss. I have negative self-criticism. I think that’s something I need to work on – being in the moment, appreciating what I’ve done and patting myself on the back once in a while.
The name Orcé is derived from the word “force,” could you explain the meaning behind the name?
I was inspired to choose this name because when I worked in advertising, I had a big issue with the way Asian women were portrayed in media and by brands. The typical ad featuring Asian spokesmodels depicted women demurely and quietly. I felt that it was not very empowering.
Some brands are inspired by a geisha. I think geishas are beautiful and it’s a part of performance art in Japanese culture. I love everything about it but to use geishas as the mascot of a brand is not very appropriate. People who really understand Japanese culture know that geishas are women with zero social mobility. Traditionally, they were sold by their parents to a tea house where they’re forced to learn how to serve and perform for men. Their existence was for the pleasure and entertainment of men.
Maybe people don’t read into it as much as I do, I’m very interested in marketing and consumer psychology. It bothered me that we didn’t have a brand that celebrates Asian women as a force to be reckoned with. I chose the word Orcé from the word force because I want to show that Asian women are a force of nature.
Could you talk about the six foundation shades and how they came to be?
It was my first time creating a foundation line. The chemist I worked with told me that most beauty companies are copying other brands. They would collect the top-selling colors of another brand. Then they chose colors they liked and reproduced them. I thought, what I’ll do is, go to Japan and Korea, purchase their top-selling foundation lines and bring them back to the US to review with my chemist. So that’s what I did. I brought the shades back and started testing them on myself and my friends. We quickly learned that even though they were made for Asian consumers, the shades did not match our bare skin.
Japanese foundation lines tend to be very pink, they oxidize a lot. I asked a Japanese friend why that is. She said it’s the color correction to tone out the yellow in the skin to make it look pink and porcelain. That ties in with the Asian standard of beauty of wanting to look white with big eyes, tall nose, skinny face and porcelain skin. None of which are natural features of Asian ethnic backgrounds. Korean beauty brands, such as Laneige or Amore Pacific, have shades with an ashy, pink cast. There’s so much color correction. I want everyone to embrace their natural skin color no matter what color you are. I wanted my foundation to help people look like themselves without feeling like they’re wearing a mask.
I scraped all the foundations I bought from Japan and Korea and created each shade from scratch based on the natural skin color of women who were instrumental in our R&D process. We then tested it on women of various shades. We were finally able to narrow it down to six. I know our six shades have received a lot of backlash in the age of Fenty and Rare Beauty, which are large VC backed, Sephora backed brands with the capital to produce 45 shades at once. As a small startup without any VC funding, I can’t create 45 shades at a time. I’m funding Orcé with the support of friends, family and my savings. So, we started with six, and I think it’s a good starting point. We’re continuing to engineer new shades based on customer feedback. We collect their feedback, and we’ve already gotten a head start on collecting new shades. I hope to build it up to a point where I can be as inclusive as possible.
We love your brand image. Tell us the story behind how you cast the models who are the face of Orcé.
I have a story for you. We were casting models in New York City, where all the top models in the world congregate, and we could not find a dark-skinned Asian model. The creative agency working for me got desperate and asked if I would be okay with casting a Black or Hispanic girl and making her look Asian. This is against everything I stand for. We already have such difficulty with representation. It’s super offensive to pretend and make a girl look Asian. I insisted we have to cast an Asian model because I designed the foundation range for Asian skin.
We actually flew in our model from Indonesia for shade six, the deepest shade we carry. The whole process made me realize how many gorgeous dark-skinned Asian women are sitting at home, thinking they can never be a model because of their skin. That weighed on my mind because of the lack of representation. When we shared the campaign photo on our Instagram, a Vietnamese girl commented after seeing the photo, saying it almost made her cry because she’s never seen anyone who looked like her as the face of a beauty brand. That made me cry because that’s exactly how I felt.
Many Korean and Japanese brands only have one model representing the brand, and they all look the same with fair skin, big eyes and dainty features. The message they’re sending is that there’s only one acceptable version of beauty. Brands don’t realize how much influence they have on women. When I cast our models, I was deliberate in picking models with different face structures that weren’t conventionally considered beautiful. I wanted to show that no matter how you look, you’re uniquely beautiful.
Could you talk about the science behind the skincare functions of the foundation?
My beauty philosophy is, if it’s not good for your skin, you shouldn’t be putting it on your face. I formulated the product with a top chemist and a Stanford trained dermatologist. I’ve always been an ingredient junkie, and I love reading scientific research in journals and clinic studies. I started researching skincare ingredients like hyaluronic acid, glycerin and salicylic acid.
Asian skin is structurally different. I don’t think many people recognize that. I interviewed a dermatologist who told me that most dermatologists don’t know how to treat Asian skin because when you go to medical school, there are little to no examples of Asian skin in the textbooks. She said that only 3% of dermatologists in the nation are Black. That is how underrepresented minorities are in the dermatology world.
The top layer of skin is called the stratum corneum, and it acts as our barrier protecting us from the outside and keeping moisture inside. For Asians, our top layer is very thin, which means we are more vulnerable to external, environmental stressors, UV rays, sun damage, harsh ingredients like acids. Throughout the day, we’re losing hydration and moisture. At the same time, we have very active sebum production. Our skin is not only oily, but it’s dehydrated, which’s a breeding ground for acne. This is why a lot of Asian skin is acne-prone and sensitive.
Through studying how to treat Asian skin, I learned that hyaluronic acid is a fantastic ingredient for us because it hydrates the skin all-day-long without oils. I know oils are popular right now, but I wouldn’t recommend them for most Asian skin because of our active sebum production. We need to be hydrating the skin, not saturating it with more oils. So I knew I had to have hyaluronic acid in my foundation.
Then we have pearl extract. My mom would feed me pearl powder every morning to whiten my skin. I had a conversation with my Asian girlfriends about the weird things our mothers would do, and I mentioned the pearl powder. A few of them also said their mothers fed them pearl powder, or they would mix it in a mask. I was like, wait. this is a real thing. Let me look into it. Not a lot of studies have been done in the West on pearl powder or Chinese medicine. I looked into studies done in Asia and learned it has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. It was widely known that Empress Wu Zetian, known for her legendary beauty, used pearl powder as an integral part of her beauty regimen.
Pearls contain a compound called nacre. It’s clinically proven to speed up the healing of wounds and stimulate collagen growth, which means it’s great for anti-aging. According to Chinese medicine, it’s known to suppress melanin, which reduces hyperpigmentation and brightens the skin. Asian skin is prone to hyperpigmentation, so I definitely wanted this ingredient in my foundation. There’s nothing more luxurious than a foundation made of pearls. It also has a special meaning for me of a mother giving her daughter the gift of beauty.
The last ingredient is Evodia fruit. In Mandarin, it is called wu zhu yu. The herb is traditionally used to cure headaches and colds, and it boosts your immune system. My chemist presented the ingredient to me as research has shown it boosts radiance in your skin dramatically and protects your skin from overreacting to environmental pollutants and stressors. Asian skin types tend to flush easily because of pollutants and sunlight. This ingredient acts as a powerful antioxidant. Combining these three ingredients, I wanted to create a makeup skincare hybrid. That is how our oil-free formula was born. We put it through rigorous dermatologist testing to make sure it’s suitable for sensitive skin, and it’s non-comedogenic, which means it won’t clog your pores or cause breakouts.
How has COVID-19 impacted your work and the business?
My office was in a co-working space, and when the lockdown happened, they said we still had to pay full rent because it was going to be temporary. I was in Singapore when SARS happened, and I knew the shutdown wasn’t going to be two weeks. A month went by, and I decided to terminate our lease and work remotely.
Working from home is tricky for me because I don’t have an excuse to leave my laptop. There are days where I eat lunch in front of my computer. When I was working in an office, we would go out for lunch or go for a coffee. In my free time, I take my dog out to the park. I have a personal trainer who I meet in the park to work out. I have been cooking a lot, and I started doing pottery at home. I pick up clay from a local pottery studio and bring it home to do some handbuilding.
Pre-COVID, our manufacturer was based in Northern California, but they shut down. We had to keep production going, and my head of production use to work at L’Oréal, which uses great manufacturers in Taiwan. We’ve vetted manufacturers out in Taiwan and was able to find a new vendor to work with. We weren’t impacted severely because we saw what was coming and immediately started finding a plan B.
Photographs courtesy of Yu-Chen Shih.
Asian-owned Brands
Weekly Thoughts
Last week: What is a kind gesture someone has shown toward you?
Your responses:
“Someone I fell out of friendship with a while back sent me flowers when I was sad.” – Layan Dahhan, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
“My friend in another continent woke up early to call me.” – Samantha Hoo, Tasmania, Australia
“At my makeup job, my client asked me if I wanted some water. The smallest offer gives me the biggest joy!” – Meredith Koh, Singapore
This week: What are your new year’s resolutions?
#ALIAtalks to join the conversation and we will feature the best submissions in next week’s newsletter. For email submissions, please email contact@alia.news
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