Sabrina Elba On Ghana’s Hidden Beauty Crisis – And Why It’s Time For Change 

How often do you wonder where the ingredients in your favourite moisturiser came from? Not the brand, or the store, but the exact patch of land where the shea trees grow and strong-armed women churn their seeds into thick butter?

The explosion of the beauty industry over the past decade means we all know our retinol from our hyaluronic acid, but we’re still less likely to consider the origins of our skincare in the same way we seek out sustainable fashion and Fairtrade food. Cruelty-free beauty is common parlance now, but that only covers animal testing – there’s far less transparency around how the humans who underpin this multi-billion-dollar business are treated, many of whom are rural women producing the raw ingredients that international beauty companies rely on.

Activist and businesswoman Sabrina Elba started out like us: a well-meaning consumer. Frustration over a breakout of acne in her early thirties, coupled with a lack of brands catering to melanin-rich skin (which can be more prone to concerns such as sensitivity and hyperpigmentation), led her to co-found her own skincare line, S’ABLE Labs, alongside her husband Idris in 2022.

“All I saw was melanin-inclusive beauty being treated as niche, a separate aisle in the drugstore, even though it’s beneficial for everyone. Even now people ask, ‘So is S’ABLE only for Black skin?’ and I want to scream, because no-one asks if Korean beauty is only for Korean skin,” she says. “I just wanted to change the narrative around African beauty, and draw on the traditional ingredients and knowledge of communities like my mother’s in Somalia that have been passed down for their efficacy,” she says.

It was a new string to her bow after years of activism: since 2020, Elba has served as a UN Goodwill Ambassador focused on empowering rural farming communities; she’s co-chair of Global Citizen’s European Board; and she spoke passionately about how climate change impacts women and girls at COP27. What she didn’t bargain for was just how much her two passions would intersect. “The more I got into the nitty gritty of sourcing skincare ingredients, it was like pulling back the curtain: broken supply chains, child labour, unfair wages. Understanding these hidden crises within the beauty industry has sort of become my obsession.”

Most recently, she went on a field trip to Ghana with charity World Vision to meet women on the frontline of the shea butter industry. “Demand for shea is booming around the world; I call it ‘white gold’ because it’s such a wonder ingredient. It’s one of very few natural products that acts as a humectant [drawing moisture into the skin], an occlusive [keeping moisture in] and an emollient [softening and smoothing] all at once,” Sabrina explains. Originally produced in west Africa centuries ago for use as a lubricant during childbirth, it’s now sought after by brands all over the world as a core ingredient for moisturisers, hair conditioners, lipsticks and soaps.

Sabrina reached out to World Vision after coming across its report, The High Price Of Beauty, wanting to see firsthand how lack of regulation and support for the primary producers of shea butter is leading to harsh working conditions and even instances of child labour. What she saw galvanised her. “These women are working incredibly hard, for an incredibly long hours – sometimes getting up as early as 3am to pick the shea nuts before international buyers beat them to it,” says Elba. Shea trees are wild, which means heading out into land riddled with snakes, scorpions and dangerous insects in the dark; one NGO working in the shea industry estimates that 30,000 women a year in Ghana are bitten by snakes while collecting kernels. And that’s just the beginning of the process. The many physical hours of grinding, processing and churning take their toll on workers’ health, and often their children will be onsite around machinery and intense heat because there’s no one else to watch them. “There are social attitudes to contend with, too, that mean women must work twice as hard for the same financial gain, and struggle more to get investment or a piece of land,” Sabrina adds.

All this, to still be lowest paid people in the shea value chain: women producers are typically earning less than USD $1.25 per day of work. “There is so much that’s out of their control. I visited a co-operative of 30 women who’d worked together to produce a huge yield for a specific cosmetics company, then suddenly the contract was dropped and their families were at risk simply because companies refuse to share their suppliers,” Elba says. “There’s also the fact that the rainy seasons are less predictable now, and there’s so little funding for rural businesspeople to learn how to export shea themselves and get in contact with international buyers, so some people now come to Ghana and buy up all the raw materials from under them. It’s a sacred African process that’s been passed down for generations and it makes me really sad to see it appropriated and undervalued in that way.”

Elba is determined to do things differently at S’ABLE Labs, and that means regular field trips to help her suppliers build processes so they can run independently, “right down to teaching them how to fill out a shipping form,” Elba says. “It’s time-consuming but when you hear that, a year on, these farmers have bought their first machine or sent their children to school, that’s the stuff that keeps us going.”

She’s a woman who puts her money where her mouth is, and that’s because the drive to spotlight the knowledge and skill of women across the continent runs through her veins. Growing up as the only Black girl at her school in Vancouver, the way Sabrina saw African women portrayed in the media was at odds with what she saw at home. “I grew up with a very strong African mother who constantly told us how powerful African women are. The qualities I’ve always admired in her, I now find myself subconsciously trying to emulate them,” she says. “She left Somalia before the civil war broke out and had to watch her country fall apart on TV. She’d say to us every year, ‘I have to go back, I have to help,’ but, of course, she couldn’t. I think I’ve taken that on in some way. I want the world to be a better place for the little girl my mom was.”

When Sabrina met actor Idris Elba in 2017, the eyes of the world were suddenly on her, and she’s always been determined to use that spotlight for good. “I take the idea of having a platform really seriously, and to me, one of the best things you can do is lend it to others,” she says. “I feel very blessed to have had the opportunities I’ve had, and also to be married to someone who’s widened my view of what I can do. Idris is the craziest multi-hyphenate who thinks he can do anything and everything, and he makes me believe that about myself, too. My ceiling is so much higher and that’s why my goals are big.”

Her recent trip to Ghana highlighted how women makers are treated as an afterthought by both the beauty industry and government leaders – and Elba is hopeful that a combination of more thoughtful, informed consumers and the tireless work of NGOs will result in a better deal for them soon. “The solutions are there, it’s just about funding and political will: voting in leaders around the world who respect rural people and the value they bring to our economies and lives, and put proper infrastructure in place for them,” she says. “These are not impossible problems, just ignored problems.” With her work, she hopes to make them impossible to ignore for much longer.