Subscription beauty boxes are a great idea. Once a month, you get a small box in the mail filled with treats: mini lipsticks, hair masks, perfume samples. They allow you to play around and test products in a noncommittal way. There’s just one problem: these services typically ignored women of color — until now. Enter HuesBox, a monthly beauty box service founded by the Harris family (Jenae, her mom Robin and her sister Jasmine) specifically for women of color. HuesBoxes range in price all the way from $12 to $108 and their website allows you to buy full-size versions of sample products you like.

Jenae was disappointed with the beauty boxes she’d tried. "If it was makeup, the coloring would be off," she told MPR News. "Lipstick, the shades would be inappropriate for my skin tone or [the] hair products were not made for kinkier textured hair, like mine."

"This is by people of color, for people of color — not just African-Americans," Robin said to MPR News. "We're talking about Asians, Hispanics and American Indians because it's this missing component of other boxes that are out there."

HuesBoxes are also designed to support small businesses. They feature products specifically from local vendors, like whipped shea butter from Butters by Jay in Brooklyn. And in addition to beauty products, the boxes include items targeted toward wellness. "We'll have products to reduce stress and boost mental health — topics not discussed often in communities of color," Jenae told MPR News. 

The Harris family makes the boxes themselves at their home in Minnesota. "This is a labor of love many years in the making," says a statement on their website. "HuesBox is more than a subscription box service. It is a full-scale community created to connect people of color interested in all things health and beauty." 

(h/t Cosmopolitan)