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“There’s something powerful about seeing you in the mirror,” Ami Colé founder Diarrha Ndiaye-Mbaye tells ESSENCE. What was born as a short-sighted solution for melanin-enhancing beauty quickly turned into a viral sensation not even the founder saw coming.
From innovating classics to building community, and finding self-care in between, beauty is more than just a brand, but a ritual (like going to the hair salon) bottled up into a tube. Here, Ndiaye-Mbaye opens up to ESSENCE exclusively about her journey as an entrepreneur, making viral products, motherhood, and more.
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The Genesis of Ami Colé
Ndiaye-Mbaye founded Ami Colé, a melanin-rich beauty brand, just under six years ago. “I’m a product junkie,” she tells ESSENCE. “I would meet you at a party in the bathroom and look in your makeup bag,” she continues. “The beauty products I wanted, someone else wanted too. It was very communal.”
However, she never imagined the success she’d have within the community she built. “I wasn’t thinking past year one,” she says, taking the brand one step at a time. In 2021, the brand launched with three products: a Skin-Enhancing Tint, Lip Treatment Oil, and Light-Catching Highlighter, which reflected her intention of using makeup to look more like yourself, not less.
Classics Over Virality
Although her Lip Treatment Oil and Skin-Enhancing Tint are her most viral products, Ndiaye-Mbaye cares more about classics than buzz. “My mom could use the same bar of soap for like 20 years,” she says about the woman she named her brand after. With the intention of innovating classics, she thinks about products her mom would use in her beauty arsenal, “but with a modern twist that could attract multiple generations.”
The Generation Before The Brand
As a first generation Senegalese-American born in Harlem, New York, she was raised almost exclusively between 114th and 125th street. “My mom has had a hair salon in Harlem for 36 years,” she says, with Black beauty being her most prominent childhood memory. From reading tabletop magazines, like Essence, Jet and Ebony to the business being passed to her sister, the rich culture,matriarchy, and generational wealth in the salon was Ndiaye-Mbaye’s coming of age story.
“I know community, now, is a buzzword, but it really is that,” she says. “I think it makes us different from existing brands where it’s all about sharing,” she says, banking on “if you know, you know” connections. “What my mom was able to create physically, I love to do that in a way that transcends through product.”
Balancing Her Babies: Ami Colé and Motherhood
“It’s something you don’t even understand the gravity of until you’re in it,” she says. Even after her first pregnancy, which she considered relatively easy, she was in for a shock after jumping right back into running her business without maternity leave. “My baby was like a month and a half, and I woke up with Bell’s Palsy,” she says.
“[My mom] had no maternity leave, I was on her back, she was braiding until 10 o’clock at night,” she says, recalling her mother’s tenacity and strength. It wasn’t until the second time around did Ndiaye-Mbaye learn the importance of postpartum care. “I had to rewire my mind to not think struggle means success,” she says. “I know now how important it is to have a village.”
Self-Care is Non-Negotiable
From acupuncture to acupressure, the founder falls back on Eastern medicine as her self-care non-negotiable. “We’re not even breathing properly,” she says. “Finding pockets and moments throughout the day, getting that massage, and stretching to release that energy,” is how she takes care of herself. And of course, skin care. “I don’t care how stressed or tired I am. I’m going to be in the bathroom for about 30 minutes and putting it on.”
The Lesson Behind It All
“Always remember your ‘why’,” she’s learned. Almost six years in, “I am shocked when I go back and read my journals,” she says. “You have to be careful what you wish for and be specific about what you want it to look like,” including what you stand for and who. “I’m always thinking about how I can make sure my daughter grows up in a world where Ami Colé is normal.”