Despite all of the acclaim and accolades that have arisen out of Sabrina Dhowre Elba’s work, the founder of S’Able Labs started both her entrepreneurial and philanthropic endeavors with much shyness.
“I was very much like, ‘don’t look at me.’ How do I not stand out?” Elba mused in a conversation with Jenny B. Fine, editor in chief of Beauty Inc and executive editor, beauty at WWD during WWD x FN x Beauty Inc’s annual Women In Power forum.
Though even from a young age, Elba’s penchant for helping others superseded her reserve, she said. “I won Miss Vancouver,” she said. “It haunts you for the rest of your life; if I ever go missing the news will call me a former beauty pageant [winner],” she joked. “The pageant was raising quite a bit of money for a children’s hospital.”
Serving the underserved has been the throughline between all of her endeavors, starting with the need states that led to her skin care line, S’Able Labs. “Skin care knowledge was democratized and I was very frustrated with where I was with my acne-prone skin,” Elba said. “I found myself never figuring out the solution.”
Elba reasoned that focusing on the needs of melanin-rich skin would result in products that were not only universal in their audience, but better-performing, too. “Start with the group with the most need, and you get better skin care for everyone,” she said.
“The needs of melanin-rich skin are unfortunately seen as niche. It’s drier because it lacks ceramides, it’s more sensitive, being more prone to inflammation. What you get is skin care that’s actually better for a greater part of the population,” she continued. “I tried to figure out why every dermatologist just threw tretinoin at my face, and wasn’t addressing hyperpigmentation the way I think it needs to be.”
So much of the brand’s genesis — which currently entails products like Qasil Cleanser and the Okra Face Serum — was informed by Elba’s own background of work in Africa.
“I do a lot of work around agriculture in my philanthropic side of things. I’ve been really passionate about changing narratives for people in the Global South,” Elba said. “The people I knew back home were extremely hardworking, talented individuals, not waiting for a handout. And that was important to get across, that they’re not just waiting for an aid cycle. The work I do is based on investment, not aid.”
That has included sourcing ingredients for her product line directly, as well as a slew of other issues in the geography she’s hoping to remedy.
“Having that background in my philanthropic work, I didn’t want to create a brand sourced from God-knows-where. We know these farmers by name, and by eliminating that middleman process, we’re able to pay people the right market rate and alleviate issues like child labor, for instance,” Elba said, acknowledging that the problems were “multilateral.
“You start looking at gender issues when you’re talking about land rights for women, and then women’s abilities to send their kids to schools touches on education. Then, you’re talking about world hunger, and these farmers grow nutritious food that feeds 80 percent of the population,” Elba continued. “So much of this work is so intertwined into gender, and one of the reasons I became passionate about gender work is seeing this kind of interconnectivity in the work I was doing with rural people.”
