Beauty Brand "Carol's Daughter" shows beauty is more than skin deep

Originally published on ABC-7

NEW YORK -- 'Carol's Daughter' founder Lisa Price talks about the importance of her collaboration with Disney's 'The Little Mermaid' on this episode of 'Unfiltered,' a new Localish series which takes a deeper dive into conversations around cultural identity, beauty, and fashion from an inclusive lens.

To Price, her brand of hair products allows for textured hair to be treated with love and care, and this mission is especially important when talking about Disney princesses.

When growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Price didn't see a lot of people who looked like her in the media, which made her feel like her family was the only bubble that her real story could exist in.

"In my family, we were all told that we were beautiful children," she told ABC Localish. "But you didn't see people who looked like your aunts, your uncles and your cousins and your parents in media as beautiful. It was usually something negative."

As a child, Price's favorite Disney character was Cinderella. But in a lot of princess movies like Cinderella, she often didn't see herself reflected in the characters, which caused her to question her own existence and appearance.

"I remember saying to my mother, 'Oh, I want to be a princess. I want to wake up with long blonde hair and blue eyes,' because that's what the princess looked like," Price said. "I remember my mother having this conversation with me about how I can be a princess, but princesses don't have to have blonde hair and blue eyes they can have brown hair, and they can have brown eyes, and they can still be princesses. But then I began looking for the brown princesses, and I never saw them."

Price couldn't dream of getting to work with Disney at that age, which is why the opportunity to design hair products in collaboration with 'The Little Mermaid' live-action movie is so special to her. This is her second time partnering with Disney, the first being for 'The Princess and the Frog.'

"I don't know how this little black girl from Brooklyn got to be a partner with Disney," Price said. "It is truly a blessing to be in this position with Disney, not just for the first time in my career, but for the second time in my career."

To Price, this experience was the epitome of what her company was designed to do: allow for Black beauty to be more visible.

"To be in a position, that you're not just partnering with Disney, you're not just exchanging ideas and marketing and developing together, but you're doing it for a project that celebrates exactly what your life's work is, and not just my professional life's work in, representing Black beauty and pushing diversity and changing the standards with which we define beauty, but my own personal life's work, of always searching to find my voice and being assertive," Price added.

Price was overjoyed to see a movie like 'The Little Mermaid' tell the story of a Black princess in an authentic way.

"The reason that you tell the stories, especially for Black and Brown people is because no one ever told our real story," Price said. "They told the story that worked for them. They told their narrative for us."

"Disney is so wonderful in taking the nugget of the fairy tale because fairy tales are all to tell some sort of life lesson," Price added. "We retell the story, and you still have the fairy tale nugget and the life lesson, but you retell the story through a different lens, through a different set of eyes so that someone like me, when I was six, can see herself and not have to extrapolate."

Even though she believes that projects like her collaboration with Disney are important for increasing the visibility of Black beauty products, she believes that there is still work to be done. However, Price is proud that her company has played a role, however small, in increasing Black visibility in media.

"To be a part of that, that small part that small but big part that 'Carol's Daughter' plays in representation, in voices being heard in hairstyles being praised in skin being celebrated diverse beauty and not just diverse in skin tone, diverse in size, diverse in gender, gender fluidity I'm so happy to have lived through it and see it and to still be strong enough to keep working and to keep pushing for more," she said.

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