This summer, the Dingman Center will be conducting interviews with the fifteen student startups who are participating in our Terp Startup summer accelerator at the College Park WeWork. Participating student entrepreneurs received a stipend up to $5,000 that would enable them to work exclusively on their startups over eight weeks in the summer.
Iced Out Cosmetics
Founder and CEO: Isha Kamara ’20, African American Studies major
DC: Tell us about your startup. What problem are you solving and for whom?
Kamara: Iced Out Cosmetics was created to make the groups most ostracized and made to seem less attractive by society feel beautiful and like they have a place in the beauty industry. As a first generation African woman who has been bullied most of her life for having dark skin, I decided to make it my purpose to create a brand for dark skinned people of color to prove to them that they are beautiful—that beauty is not just skin deep but also a mentality that everyone can achieve with confidence. The uniqueness of this brand is that my target demographic does not start and end with only black women. Many brands make the mistake of leaving out the LGBTQIA+, they are often overlooked by brands and have no real representation in the beauty industry. My brand will be a brand that celebrates dark skin beauty and the difference that adds to our beauty as more than an aesthetic.
POSH
No exaggeration: this is a real thing that happened to a friend of mine. On the most recent season of HBO’s Girls, Marnie undergoes a similar trauma on her special day. Booking a freelance makeup artist, expecting them to show up on time and also give you the end result you want is a task so notoriously difficult that it lends itself to parody. But it doesn’t have to be so hard.