FROM award-winning actress, Halle Berry’s palest coffee to super-model, Alek Wek’s deepest chocolate.

A promise from the British firm, ‘Black By Design’, one of the latest arrivals on the cosmetics scene, in its quest to cater to the full spectrum of nature’s 52 skin shades and at the same time enhance and celebrate the many differences that is Black skin.

No easy task this, it took her all of two years to get it right, says Brand creator, Sherry Dixon, who recently launched the product here at Monifah’s Beauty Salon located on D’Urban Street, Wortmanville, between Haley and Hardina Streets.

In an interview with the Sunday Chronicle late Tuesday, Dixon, a trained cosmetologist who is Guyanese by birth but has been living in Britain since childhood, lamented: “My main problem was that there weren’t any products good enough for the very dark-skinned women.”

“That’s one of my major beefs,” she said.

And that’s the reason, she said she worked that much harder on the last three of the eight shades in the foundation line, which are more suited to the skin tones of darker skinned women.

This entailed rejecting the product no less than eight times, sending it back to the laboratory on each occasion so as to ensure they got the texture right.

“I just sent it back,” she said. “Every time I gave them the formula, and I tested it and it didn’t come out right, I sent it back.”

After eight tries, they were finally able to bring the product to a pitch she felt she could live with.

“You couldn’t push it any more; I think that I’ve got the range pretty much covered now, from the lightest light to the darkest black; there is no more that you can do.”

And while the lipsticks posed no major production problems and come in 14 interesting shades, “from shimmering Copper to fiery Flame” as it says in the brochure, they’re still having trouble with the powders.

Hopefully, she said, these will be ready in time for the big trade show held every March in Germany.

Bucking the trend to create matching powders for whatever shades of foundation there are as “exploitative,” Dixon said hers, which is the translucent, loose variety, would only come in two shades, namely light and dark.

And this is only because she has found that it sometimes takes more than a cream to powder foundation, which is the type ‘Black by Design’ has to offer, to give some people, particularly those with oily skin, that perfect matte finish.

Asked about product acceptance at home in Britain, Dixon, who also holds down a regular job as Health, Beauty and Lifestyle Editor of ‘Pride’, a leading British magazine for ethnic minority women, and is a regular contributor to this newspaper as well - said the line has been doing remarkably well in spite of initial reservations about its being no different from those already on the market.

The litmus test, she said, is the number of re-orders one gets.

“People are always willing to try something once, but if they re-order it, you know it’s right,” she said.

Here in Guyana, the feedback she has gotten is that one or two of the foundation colours have already been sold out. The ones doing particularly well, she’s been told, are Amber and Spectrum, two of the lighter shades of foundation which are basic colours for most people here.

One of the reasons she feels the line is doing so well either place, is that in spite of being a quality product, it is affordable; what she likes to call “mid-price.” The retail price of lipstick here is $1,500 while that of the foundation is $2,500.

She says she is so impressed with the professionalism with which Monifah’s is run, particularly the way it stores its products, she plans making it her main distributor.

“I think that I want to start off with this as the main distributor; I don’t really want it in just any old store; I think it needs to be in the right places,” she said.

She also has her sights set on ‘Double ‘C’ salon out in Queenstown.