Working as a marketing assistant at beauty and makeup giant Ansen Creative Cosmetics (ACC) was not what twenty-six year old Cameron King wanted. But La Belle, Ansen's rival, wasn't hiring and ACC was the next best thing. So what can she do but accep...
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Take a deep breath, Cameron thought to herself. Hold it for one. Two. Three. Release through your mouth. Open your eyes.
It was Day One.
Day One of her new job at Ansen Creative Cosmetics.
Normally, Cameron would be excited to be starting a new job, especially one that she had graduated college for. She would have a nice outfit ready the night before, have her hair moisturized, twisted, and under a bonnet for styling the next day, and her make-up looked planned: simple, natural, but with a little bit of glam followed with gold hooped earrings, three rings on each hand, and a simple gold necklace.
It would be perfect, especially when working at a make-up company.
And yes, she was working at a make-up company. Just not the one that she wanted.
Ansen Creative loomed before her, the building somewhat tall and totally imposing. Located in Lake Haven, North Carolina, Ansen Creative was one of the very few make-up companies not based in New York or L.A. It was housed in the wonderful, growing town of Lake Haven, which was rapidly expanding as businesses boomed and the local university expanded.
Cameron had lived in Lake Haven all of her life, going to college at Haven University with a degree in marketing. She'd been a small girl when Ansen Creative first opened locally as Ansen Make-up Company, and had seen it grow into the global beauty brand that it was today. She'd seen it bring jobs to her community and contribute to the environment around it.
But no matter how big and how successful Ansen Creative was, the fact of the matter was that she didn't want to work there. She wanted to work at their rival, La Belle Cosmetics. La Belle had opened up around the same time as Ansen, and the two had grown at much the same pace: rapidly.
But the two businesses differed.
While both Ansen Creative and La Belle were both owned by Black women—Bethany Williams owned Ansen and Odessa Gray owned La Belle—the two companies had different ideologies.
La Belle was about the quantity: they released a palette for every season, each themed differently, and their products were cheaper but of pretty good quality. Perfect for the fast-paced make-up industry. Because of the consistency of their products and the speed their palettes were produced, they were consistently lauded for how beautiful their palettes were and how well-made they were for a company that just pumped them out. They had some of Cameron's favorite celebrities sponsoring their brand, and their marketing company was top-notch. Wanda King—no relation to Cameron whatsoever—was a marketing genius and Cameron longed to work with her.
Ansen, though, was more about quality and innovation. The company only released two special palettes per year—one in the spring and summer, and one in the fall and winter. Each palette was versatile, expensive, and extremely high quality. The company put so much care into what colors they placed in their palettes, and besides the general palette that they released and re-released each time because of updates to the formula, they were generally slower-paced with their releases. Their palettes had a wider range than La Belle, and though each brand catered to Black people, Ansen Creative had this way of making working with Black skin and making it glow. Their marketing was good, but not as good as La Belle. There was always something lacking and Cameron couldn't place it.
