The Essential List 02. Asha Shivaji’s Beauty + Wellness Favorites

The CEO and Co-Founder of SeeMe Index shares the ultimate red lip, how to bring the Korean sauna to your home, and how she took her business from an idea to a daydream to reality in six months.

I’m thrilled to feature Asha Shivaji, the CEO and Co-Founder of SeeMe Index.

First up, Asha is sharing her Beauty and Wellness essentials. Then I share our conversation about how being laid off from Google, taking a trip to Sedona, and daydreaming about inclusivity culminated in the creation of SeeMe Index.

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CeraVe Moisturizing Cream

Cerave Moisturizing Cream I travel…a lot and flights, especially long haul flights, were killing my skin. I went to the derm and was sure I needed steroids or something to help with the dryness and she asked me to just give CeraVe a try for a week and she was 1000% correct. I never leave the house without this cream. It’s the only thing that can keep my skin unwaveringly hydrated.

Rodan & Fields Lash Boost

Rodan & Fields Lash Boost I used to be an eyelash extension girl through and through, but when I moved to SF from NYC there just weren’t as many eyelash extension options so I started to look for alternatives and Rodan & Fields Lash Boost delivered. People still think I have extensions but it’s just Lash Boost. My eyelashes are long and thick and don’t even need a curler.

Korean Scrub Mitt

Korean Scrub Mitt I LOVE a Korean sauna and my favorite thing at a Korean sauna is a rough and effective body scrub. To supplement between spa visits I’ve bought the scrub mitt for some extra at home exfoliation.

MasterMedi Tongue Scraper

MasterMedi Tongue Scraper About a year ago my beloved yoga teacher, Janet Stone, recommended tongue scraping and now I don’t know how I lived without it. Not only does tongue scraping just make your mouth feel way cleaner BUT it more effectively removes tongue bacteria which I attribute to helping me not get sick as much.

MAC Ruby Woo

MAC Ruby Woo When I worked at MAC I was introduced to the Ruby Woo and never looked back. To me, this is THE ULTIMATE red lip. Not sure if it’s for you? Well MAC does a great job of showing the shade on a variety of skin tones on the website so take a look.

Sheila Stotts Untangle Brush

Sheila Stotts Untangle Brush I have naturally wavy hair and I just assumed brushing my hair, especially after washing it, was going to be a painful and difficult process. But about a year ago my hair dresser introduced me to the Shelia Slotts brush and I mean it when I say my life is literally so much better with it. I thank my hairdresser everyday that I use it because it’s so effective and painless. It's a joy!

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In 2023, Asha and her co-founder, Jason, launched the SeeMe Index because there was a lack of data about consumer-facing inclusivity efforts. SeeMe Index utilizes responsible AI to measure, benchmark and celebrate brands' consumer-facing Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and inclusivity efforts.

Tell me all about SeeMe Index — your backstory, the inspiration, and how it all came to be.

The inspiration for SeeMe Index is almost something that was part of me since I was little. I grew up in Minnesota and I was one of the only people of color in my class. Teachers thought my name was annoying and wouldn't even say my name, and I always kind of felt this feeling of wanting to be included myself and feeling like inclusion was so important, even though I didn't really have words for it at the time.

I think it was just this part of me, and as I got older and started my career as a junior marketer at companies like Apple, Disney, and Estee Lauder, I kept seeing situations where I felt like we weren't creating products—or putting enough people in our media and advertising—that reflected the diversity of who our customers were, but I struggled to have the weight of my voice to actually influence that.

Then, while I was at Google, a lot of the clients that we were working with kept asking us about it. Inclusivity was finally reaching a tipping point where they knew that being inclusive was just table stakes for how they needed to operate as a brand, to engage with different audiences in different groups, but nobody knew exactly how to do it. And that's been the number one reason brands haven’t been taking more action to be inclusive is because they're like: What does it look like? Am I doing enough of it? What about a misstep?

So we started SeeMe Index because we wanted to support brands and take the guesswork out of what being inclusive looks like. But at the same time, by rating brands within a certain industry, we wanted to empower consumers so that they feel like they can shop from brands that really represent their values. 67% of consumers today say they shop based on social values, so it's not something where only a couple of people care about this. It's hugely important to people, and it's really hard for consumers—I'll say for myself—to tell who's really living into what I care about versus who's doing a good job, sort of, faking it and throwing up a post at the right time of year, or highlighting a certain aspect of their brand.

What we're trying to do is really look at a brand in totality: their ads, their product, their DEI commitments, and see whether they're truly being inclusive against different identity dimensions; things like gender expression, body size, age, visible disability, amongst others— just really helping them to understand that.

I remember driving to Sedona with you last March (2023) and you had recently been laid off from Google. You told me about SeeMe Index, but it was just an idea. Then in September—six months later—you launched SeeMe Index. So, I want to know, how did you make this happen so fast?!

That Sedona trip was very monumental because, if you remember, Lauren, Emma and I went and saw a healer. We were screaming what we wanted in life off the top of a cliff in Sedona and I was screaming “PURPOSE!”

Afterward we went through some exercises and we're meditating and really trying to get in touch with what really matters to you when you quiet the noise. The Healer gave us each a little mini reading and for mine he said “Why aren't you starting your company?” And I said “I'm scared, I don't know what to do.” I had this idea, but I didn't really know what to do with it and he gave me, what I think is, some of the best advice. He said, “Just daydream about it. Make it so delicious to yourself that you're just thinking about it and visualizing it and imagining it and it'll all start coming together.”

So from that point on I started just really indulging “what would this look like?” and I honestly feel it started bringing things into my life. It made me realize people in my network I could reach out to, or skills that I might have that I hadn't really thought of leveraging in this lens. Then, I went to Bali and saw another healer (healers are a big theme for me, I guess) and again the Healer I saw really just reinforced that message that this is what you should try and do right after that trip.

I came to New York and I saw some former co-workers from Google. There was one person in particular, my now co-founder Jason, and we were at lunch and in my head I was thinking ‘I would love for Jason to do this with me,’ but I was sort of nervous to ask him. We had this long lunch and then we had more wine, and then we had even more wine, and by the end of the day he said “I really want to do this with you” and I was like, “Yes! This is what I've always wanted.”

Then we just hit the ground running and we had this incredible opportunity with Cosmetics Executive Women to launch our company at their DEI Forum, which was in October. So with this hard date in the sand we thought, well, we gotta build it and we have to make this happen. It was a great impetus for us to just get it out the door.

Did you always plan to start in Beauty and Cosmetics, or did that happen because of the CEW event?

The reason we wanted to start there was because both Jason and I had worked in Beauty— I worked at Estee Lauder and Johnson & Johnson, and Jason at L’Oreal. So we had both seen in the beauty industry that this was a big problem. You've probably seen a thousand times the sort of beauty ads where it's like one Black model, one White model, one Asian model and it's supposed to convey this inclusivity for the brand, but in reality, I've worked on brands like that with that ad and there wasn't a shade that worked for me. So, we knew that this was an industry that needed some help with this, but also that beauty as a category has this outsized impact on what inclusivity and what identity expression looks like, so we felt like it was a really important place to start, and then to start kind of driving this change.

Are there any trends you're seeing, either within beauty or generally related to DEI, since launching SeeMe Index that are new to you?

In our initial analysis of the beauty industry we looked at 1300 ads, 40 brands, probably about 20,000 data points, and we found some really interesting nuggets that we've been trying to share with the industry and I'll tell you a few of them now.

First, what we saw is when we looked at all of those ads, for each shade deeper you get in the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale (a ten shade skin tone scale that was developed by Dr. Monk along with Google to represent a broader range of communities) you lose one second of screen time. So that means if you’re looking at a beauty ad, people with the lightest skin tones are on average in ads for 13 seconds, and those with the darkest skin tones, three seconds. That's showing some incredible bias in the industry. I think people are trying to make conscious efforts to cast more diverse talent and put them in ads, but something is happening in the editing process and the talent with darker skin tones are just not getting as much screen time. So that's a stat that we've shared with the industry that we're already starting to see people implement and start making changes. The second you’re aware that something like that is a problem you can start looking for it and start making conscious changes. But this is where the data is really fueling things.

Another thing we saw is that 60% of beauty brands have moved away from the term anti-aging. You and I have talked about this, how we're all aging, it's something to celebrate and we can all define and decide to age however we want. But saying anti-aging just makes it so negative and we've seen a lot of brands start to move away from that even more since we've brought their awareness to how they're sort of a laggards if they’re still using that term.

The other thing that we've really pushed for is product testing. You'll see that most beauty products often say things like “this product's been tested on most skin tones” or “many people” and it's like, how many is “many”? What's “most”? A lot of brands are doing great work. They're testing on different skin tones, they're testing on people of different ages, and a large number of people. So they've been leading more with that since we've brought awareness that it matters to consumers. That's great to see and I know, for myself, now it's one of the first things I look at before buying a new product.

Because there are no standards related to any of this?

No. Who brands decide to test on is a brand decision and, the truth is, lighter skin tones often show more efficacy when it comes to skin care products. It's just easier to see a dark spot being lightened, or a wrinkle being lifted, or whatever it is. So, brands wanted to use more people with lighter skin tones so that they have better efficacy results. But the truth is I’d rather see a lower efficacy result, but know it’s gonna work on me, than something that just hasn't been tested on someone like me at all.

What is your first piece of advice for brands looking to improve DEI?

You need to make it a goal and make sure that it's coming to life in everything you do as a brand to be authentic. I think the days of dipping your toe in DEI are over. You’ll come across as being performative and that's when you make yourself vulnerable to backlash because you don't really know why you're doing it yourself. For example, if your brand stands for one thing and all of a sudden you're talking about a certain identity dimension, or putting certain people in in your ads, you need to understand fundamentally how showing up for certain consumers is core to your brand and then you have to bring it to life in everything you do.

Part of doing that is you have to be working alongside people of different identity dimensions. Never guess what somebody disabled wants in an ad or a product, or never guess what a good product looks or feels like to a person of color. Have those people in the room with you, if you can't hire them do focus groups, or just go out and ask people outside of a Sephora (if you're in the beauty industry and you're starting a brand), but you just can't do this stuff in isolation and try to guess what somebody wants.

Do you have a timeline or plans in place for expanding into categories outside of beauty?

We're launching with Pharmaceuticals in the first half of this year. We're really curious about looking at the relationship between ads, clinical testing, and external DEI commitments for Pharma companies.

What falls into Pharmaceuticals?

Think of all of the drug commercials you see. There's a lot of interesting historical biases about different groups in medicine. Like, being a woman, we know so many women’s health issues are under researched or underfunded and I think it gets worse when you're a woman of color, or you're a woman of color who is 55+, and there are all these different medical needs based on your identity that may not be catered to in the way that pharmaceutical companies have worked historically.

The great news is that there's a lot of interest from the pharmaceutical industry to get better at this, so we're hopeful that this data can kind of empower them as well. But after that we're thinking about doing personal care, so things like toothpaste, deodorant, over-the-counter type things, and then probably food and beverage. But we can work with any brand and any industry and any market—our methodology translates to all of those—so we're definitely talking to hand raisers and other industries that are interested in looking at their brand through this lens.

An ad for Good American

Can you highlight any Brands outside of the beauty industry that you're aware of that you think do a good job?

I think Good American is doing such an incredible job at being an inclusive brand. When it comes to their casting they have a wide range of people across so many identity dimensions, whether it's body size, skin tone, disability, sexual orientation— you just see such an extensive group of people and their product sizing lives into that too. They have jeans that can fit up to four different sizes, which not only conveys that they have a wide size range, but also that they're thinking about allowing people to have flexibility with their product as well. They've been really vocal about why they're doing this, and intentional in doing this and I love seeing that across the board from them.

My final question is more about you. How do you shop these days for beauty? Where are you discovering new brands or how are you hearing about products? Recommendations? Social? In-person?

I am deep into reading about beauty these days. So aside from keeping a close eye on the brands themselves I'm always reading like Allure or Glossy or immersed in things like who's winning what awards from like the CEW or what Circana sales data is looking like for trending brands. So there's definitely that angle, but I think there's still nothing more powerful than what I hear from friends. So I'm always like “what are you wearing?” and sort of obsessed with that side of it and hearing about what's working for people, or what looks good on them.

Something I've been really excited about is the proliferation of niche brands. I was watching Expats, that new show on Amazon Prime with Nicole Kidman and Sarayu Blue, an Indian American supporting actress. In it Sarayu's character was talking about how growing up there were never shades for her and she would mess around with all these different things to try and make shades and I was reminded for how long and how far and wide this has been a challenge for people.

Now on Instagram I get served all of these South Asian beauty brands and I'm so excited to see them! I'm wearing one from Teak right now and I love it.

MINU, a mineral sunscreen that doesn't cause white cast

Now on Instagram I get served all of these South Asian beauty brands. I'm wearing one of their lips right now that's supposed to be like a lighter lip for people with, I don't know, South Asian skin tone. So it's cool to see all of that, but I would say the thing I'm loving the most — I'm obsessed with MINU, the new mineral sunscreen. My friend started the company and having a mineral sunscreen that doesn't cause white cast is a huge innovation in the industry. I'm so excited for them and I'm happy that as a consumer we're finally at a place where that's a thing and I can have it.

Thank you, Asha! You’re an inspiration and I can’t wait to watch SeeMe Index continue to expand and evolve. Now I’m off to go daydream and scrape my tongue.

Learn more about SeeMe Index: seemeindex.ai | Instagram | LinkedIn | TikTok

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Let us know if you have any questions for Asha in the comments. And if you know anyone who might be interested in learning about SeeMe Index, please pass this along to them.

What are your Beauty + Wellness essentials? Share in a comment below or hit reply to send me a note.