Diarrha N’Diaye: The Builder Behind Melanin-First Beauty and Skims Beauty’s New EVP

Diarrha N’Diaye is a Senegalese-American beauty operator and brand builder whose work has helped redraw the industry’s center of gravity toward melanin-rich skin.

Raised in Harlem above her mother’s salon, Aminata African Hair Braiding, she grew up inside the culture of beauty before starting her career at L’Oréal and later Glossier, where she honed product, community, and go-to-market instincts.

In 2021, Diarrha N’Diaye founded Ami Colé, a clean cosmetics line “inspired by Senegal, born in Harlem,” built to deliver effortless, no-makeup makeup for deeper skin tones, think undertone-savvy tints, non-ashy highlighters, and conditioning lip oils.

The brand’s tightly edited assortment, heroing ingredients like baobab seed oil, quickly earned editorial praise and retail traction, entering Sephora in late 2022 and later expanding across North America.

Backed by early investors and, in 2024, a strategic investment from L’Oréal’s venture arm, Ami Colé seemed to embody a new playbook for Black-founded beauty at scale. Yet in July 2025, after nearly four years, Diarrha N’Diaye announced she would close the company, citing rising costs and structural headwinds that made independent growth unsustainable, an essay that doubled as a candid post-mortem on the sector’s shifting economics.

Industry analyses framed the closure as a bellwether for the pressures facing Black founders amid changing investor appetites for DEI-grounded brands.

The next act arrived swiftly. On November 4, 2025, Skims, Kim Kardashian’s multi-billion-dollar apparel brand, appointed Diarrha N’Diaye Executive Vice President of Beauty & Fragrance ahead of the launch of Skims Beauty.

The remit: lead product development, innovation, and brand strategy, translating her community-first approach into a broader “second-skin” beauty offering. The hire signals Skims’ intention to enter beauty with credibility and inclusivity at the core, leveraging a leader who has already built what many consumers have been asking for. ELLE+1

N’Diaye’s arc, salon kid to L’Oréal and Glossier alum; founder who proved demand and product-market fit; operator unafraid to interrogate the funding model—has made her a reference point for builders across the industry.

If Ami Colé’s rise and shuttering revealed the friction points of scaling mission-driven brands, her move to Skims positions her to bring that hard-won learning to a platform with global reach. It’s a bet that the future of beauty can be both mass and meaningfully inclusive—so long as the right operators are in the room.