2023 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Cheekbone Beauty is an Indigenous-owned cosmetics company founded with the expressed aim to uplift the Indigenous community and educate the general public about issues that disproportionately affect it.

In 2021 the brand launched on the platform of giving Indigenous people the voice to bring their own stories to the attention of non-Indigenous audiences. In 2022 the brand was called to confront another issue. In Canada, a land blessed with one of the largest renewable freshwater supplies in the world, over 100 Indigenous communities lack access to clean and safe drinking water, because of contamination and inadequate water treatment facilities. Many Indigenous people are forced to boil their water before using it for drinking, cooking, bathing, or else spending thousands of dollars each year buying bottled water. And while thousands of Canada’s Indigenous are affected, this crisis has been ignored by the public and politicians.

As the saying goes, “When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done”. “Glossed Over” was created to make Canadians sit up and take notice of the water contamination problem in Indigenous communities, as a first step to positive change.

Canadians would be more likely to take action to combat contaminated water if they actually had to put it to their lips.

To confront audiences with this reality and to make the issue inescapable, Cheekbone decided to bring contaminated water from Indigenous communities as close as possible to the lips of the rest of Canadians and put them in the shoes of their Indigenous counterparts.

In June, for Indigenous History Month, Cheekbone Beauty created ‘Glossed Over’ a lip gloss set made using contaminated water from Indigenous communities dealing with the issue for decades. The set featured three variants: E. COLI KISS - in golden, earthy tones made with E. Coli-contaminated water from Neskantaga First Nation. MERCURY SHIMMER - a silvery variant containing mercury-tainted water from Grassy Narrows First Nation. LUSCIOUS LEAD - a fashionable purple-speckled gloss containing water laced with lead from the Cowichan Tribes of Vancouver Island.

As with naming, the packaging deceptively followed beauty codes. The set of three glosses was placed in a luxuriously black box with a striking rainbow-coloured pattern drawing from Indigenous designs and sent out to unsuspecting beauty influencers and politicians. Upon opening the box they were confronted with the issue: If you wouldn’t put contaminated lip gloss to your lips, why should Indigenous people have to put contaminated water to theirs? They launched to the public on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube with a video crafted to resemble a traditional beauty campaign, and partnered with beauty giant Sephora to donate sales from all Cheekbone products to Water First, a non-profit fighting water crises.

The objective of this activity was to raise awareness of the water contamination challenges of Indigenous communities.

The campaign garnered over 36 million impressions, reaching millions of Canadians to educate them on this important issue. It was featured in over 100 publications, including internationally acclaimed beauty magazines Fashion and Elle Canada, as well as prominent Canadian news publications Toronto Star, National Post, Financial Post, Toronto Sun, Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, and many, many more.

“Glossed Over” was talked about in segments on CBC Radio One, CTV, CityNews and Global News. Not only has the activity brought this issue to the attention of many more Canadians but, as a bonus, the campaign raised over $45,000 from the Sephora partnership. This money was used by Water First to train young people in Indigenous communities to become certified water treatment plant operators, empowering them to take matters into their own hands and begin to correct a problem that has been ignored for too long.

Credits

AGENCY:

Agency: Sid Lee Toronto
Executive Creative Director: Jeffrey Da Silva
Creative Director: Matt Fraracci
Copywriter: Peter Sreckovic
Art Director(s): Raine Calucag, Sammy Lo
Designer(s): Matthew Beaubien
Head of Account Services: Zemina Moosa
EVP, Head of Strategy: Catherine Moustou
Account Supervisor: Jamie Flatow
Head of Production: Amanda Loughran
Executive Producer: Elana Olavesen
Post-Production Producer: Lisa Clarke
Post-Production Director: Andréanne Denis
Post-Production Supervisor: Elizabeth Fedak, Lisa Clarke
Director : Thomas Fortier
Editor: Mac Thomson, Maxine Hood, Simon Gosselin
Audio Editor: Noah Dauphinais
Production Coordinator: Morgan Kendall, Hugo Beaupre, Gabriela Salon
PR Manager: Kristel Dupont
PR Coordinator: Linda Chen
Creative Services Director: Kyra Cohen
Sr. Creatives services Manager: Justin Hewitt

CLIENT:

CHEEKBONE BEAUTY
Founder: Jenn Harper
EA to the founder: Breann Rogers
Digital strategy & marketing manager: Andrea Pohlmann

Sephora Canada
Project Manager, Marketing: Elizabeth Elliott
Senior marketing manager: Amanda Hungerford

Water First
Director of development and communications: Ami Gopal
Communications & development specialist: Mason Prout