FAE Beauty and the Business of Inclusivity

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“Branding is the art of differentiation.” — David Brier

FAE Beauty, short for Free And Equal Beauty, is one of the few homegrown Indian makeup brands that has refused to play by the conventional rules of cosmetics marketing. When multinational giants dominated the Indian beauty market, their shade ranges and campaigns often revolved around Eurocentric standards. “Nude” lipsticks leaned beige, foundations carried undertones that catered poorly to brown skin, and fairness creams topped sales charts. For decades, inclusivity was treated as an afterthought.

FAE entered the scene with a direct challenge to this history. Founded by Karishma Kewalramani, the brand articulated a simple mission: create high-performance products that work for Indian skin tones and celebrate them rather than diminish them. This was more than a positioning exercise. It was a statement against the narrow and damaging lens through which beauty had been marketed to millions of Indian consumers.

The brand began with its Modern Matte line, which includes 10 shades described as versatile nudes such as Warm Toasted Pink, Warm Sand Brown, Cold Clay Brown, and others, each named to reflect different tone and undertone considerations. From there, it built a product line that is vegan, cruelty-free, and formulated with Indian climates in mind. Shade diversity functions as the organising principle of the brand, shaping both product design and communication.

FAE’s marketing avoids overly retouched imagery or filters that distort how products look on real skin. Campaigns feature a spectrum of models, from deeper tones to unconventional features, often photographed in natural light. Influencers and everyday users double as brand ambassadors, with user-generated content spotlighted across channels. The result is a catalogue of representation that feels lived-in, not staged.

The Shark Tank India appearance in 2025 brought FAE into mainstream business discourse, but the brand’s momentum had been building long before. Its direct-to-consumer strategy, paired with accessible pricing, placed it at the intersection of aspiration and attainability. This balance is critical in India’s rapidly expanding beauty market, where global luxury brands set aspirational cues but leave vast gaps in accessibility.

FAE’s success lies in the way it treats inclusivity as infrastructure rather than ornamentation. This is not a brand that sprinkles diverse models across its campaigns while maintaining products that fail half the market. Instead, it solves functional gaps, undertones, longevity in humid weather, versatility across skin textures, and then layers emotional storytelling on top.

From a marketing perspective, this creates trust capital. Consumers do not feel marketed at; they feel represented within. That distinction explains why FAE’s products often circulate organically on social platforms, with users sharing experiences as proof of authenticity. The absence of over-produced advertising is itself a positioning strategy: authenticity becomes both the message and the medium.

Another defining element is linguistic positioning. The name Free And Equal Beauty functions as more than a label; it is a manifesto. By embedding its purpose into the very act of naming, the brand anchors every launch, campaign, and communication to a single guiding principle. This coherence strengthens its voice in a crowded market, where differentiation comes from clarity of purpose rather than cosmetic variations in packaging or price.

FAE Beauty demonstrates that in emerging markets, inclusivity is a competitive advantage. Multinational giants can outspend on ad budgets, but they cannot easily retrofit their global product portfolios for every regional nuance. FAE, by starting local, built a brand architecture that is inherently contextual.

The larger lesson here is that authenticity requires alignment across product, communication, and experience. A brand that preaches inclusivity without delivering shades that match skin undertones fails. A brand that makes vegan claims but markets through unrealistic imagery fails. FAE’s durability comes from coherence, every element points back to its founding idea.

The Indian beauty market has long been structured around aspiration, where global aesthetics were imported and local realities ignored. FAE Beauty is part of a new wave of brands proving that credibility can be built by designing for consumers rather than asking them to adapt.

For marketers, the campaign lesson is direct: inclusivity is most persuasive when it begins in the product lab, not the advertising brief. FAE’s rise is proof that in beauty, as in branding, differentiation grounded in lived reality will always resonate louder than borrowed ideals.