WHAT THEY WERE UP AGAINST
All health research begins online.
It comes as no surprise that parents turn to online resources to research health and skincare conditions for their babies. When our team went to research baby eczema, a representation gap confronted us. We saw pages and pages of white babies, with almost zero representation of Black babies with eczema even though Black babies are 1.7 times more likely to develop this skin condition.
The more research we did, the more inequity we discovered. Less than 5% of the images in medical textbooks related to baby eczema feature Black and brown babies. Parents and medical professionals had less access to what eczema looks like on non-white babies.
What we did to help
Righting a wrong.
We shared these insights with our client partners and collectively committed to correcting this inequity through education and inclusion. With a Black-owned photography partner, we created 1,800 images of Black and brown babies to demonstrate what eczema looks like on a wider array of skin tones.
To help parents in future online searches, we created an Eczema Equality portal within the Aveeno website. Here, we shared information about recognizing and diagnosing eczema in Black babies, as well as products to treat eczema. The 1,800 images we created sit on this site and will, over time, populate Google searches so one day parents won’t find what we did.