A new activation from Dark & Lovely, the 52-year-old brand owned by L’Oréal Group, aims to make online gaming more inclusive to Black players.
For the popular The Sims 4 game, Dark & Lovely created in-game modifications that gamers can use to customize their avatar players. The modifications, also called mods, were published Tuesday and consist of six hairstyles, such as protective braids and natural textures. Each has 10-12 color variations inspired by three of Dark & Lovely’s newer hair dye colors in its Immersive Bolds collection.
This marks the first time Dark & Lovely is traversing into the virtual gaming space, and the team wanted to focus on a platform or game that has not been populated by other beauty brands the way Animal Crossing, Roblox and Decentraland have. MAC Makeup previously worked with The Sims 4 on makeup designs for The Sims characters in 2020, but Dark & Lovely appears to be the first hair-care brand to show up in the game. Timed with the launch of the avatar features, Dark & Lovely also released a social documentary called “Play in Color,” which spotlights people redefining the gaming industry. The documentary is hosted on Dark & Lovely’s website and YouTube page.
“We wanted to be the first [on a platform] … and bringing this new directive to consumers was important. We’re saying, ‘We’re a brand built for Black women to express themselves,’” said Noah Yung-Hing, vp of marketing for Dark & Lovely. “We are in the third stage of [inclusivity and diversity] for hair. The first was where natural hairstyles were not accepted anywhere, and the second stage was acceptance in spaces like work, sports and television. Now, we can go deeper and showcase the diversity of natural hairstyles, and this is exactly what we’re doing with The Sims 4.”
While Dark & Lovely’s core customer demo is 45 years old and above, the activation is an attempt to court Gen Z, said Tenaj Ferguson, marketing director for Dark & Lovely. Over the past few years, Dark & Lovely has adapted to changing attitudes toward Black hairstyles. In 2019, it rebranded with an updated logo, new outer product packaging and product expansions. And in 2020, it launched a Protective Styles Collection informed by customers eschewing traditional hair relaxers to embrace natural styles. The brand signed actress and producer Meagan Good as a brand ambassador in 2023.
L’Oréal Group does not break out individual brand sales. But Dark & Lovely sits within the company’s Consumer Division, which grew its sales by 12.6% year-over-year to $15 billion in 2023, according to L’Oréal Group earnings shared in February. Consumer Products was the largest sales division, with sales exceeding that of the Professional Products, L’Oréal Luxe and Dermatological Beauty divisions.
To develop the six hairstyles for The Sims 4, Dark & Lovely partnered with Black U.K.-based gamer and content creator Danielle Udogaranya, whose username is “Ebonix.” Udogaranya has 57,000 Instagram followers and over 33,000 Twitch followers. Gamers can download the mods on the Dark & Lovely website instead of directly within the The Sims 4 game, but the styles and colors had to be approved by the Maxis and Electronic Arts, which developed and published The Sims 4. The designs do not directly reference the brand name.
According to Ferguson, citing data from the UTA gaming agency, 73% of Black people enjoy playing video games. And previous reports show that The Sims 4 players are 60% female, while Roblox and Animal Crossing estimates are closer to 50% female.
“It makes sense to represent [customers] in spaces where they already exist and to bring more of those hairstyles into the game,” said Ferguson.
The brand’s promotions for the activation are expansive — Ferguson said the corresponding campaign is one of the brand’s biggest but declined to share financial figures. Starting Tuesday, Dark & Lovely began running month-long ads for its social documentary on Snapchat, as Snapchat is a “Gen Z gamer-centric platform,” Ferguson said. The ads drive to the landing page for the mods. Social content and paid ads also began this week and will run for approximately four months. Dark & Lovely will tap paid and unpaid beauty and gaming content creators on social media platforms including Instagram to bring to life some of the avatar mod hairstyles. The brand will also work with its retail partners, including Walmart, Target and Amazon, to show the campaign content on its brand and product information e-commerce pages. Lastly, Dark & Lovely has newly dedicated part of its scholarship program, Building Beautiful Futures, to women pursuing design and STEM fields of study in partnership with the NAACP.
The Dark & Lovely declined to provide download figures at the time of publication. But Ferguson shared that the landing page featuring the mods is currently the No. 1 most-viewed page on Dark & Lovely’s website. What’s more, the Poppin’ Pink dye shade from the Immersive Bolds collection has experienced a 40% increase in month-over-month traffic since the campaign’s debut and without the aid (yet) of paid media.
“This is a huge opportunity for the whole [L’Oréal Group] organization and certainly for us to be the pioneers partnering with The Sims 4 in this way,” said Ferguson.
