Dorion Renaud, founder of Buttah Skin, has been in the business of beauty since a child. Growing up in a Texan barbershop, Renaud was working the register, interacting with clients, and learning how to be an entrepreneur from a young age.
“I was that child that was running the front and thinking I’m running a business,” he tells ESSENCE. “Watching people coming in and out of my dad’s barbershop and beauty salon really impacted me, making me look at self-care as the business of making people feel good about themselves.”
It wasn’t until high school, however, that he started to notice his skin developing issues, then in college, getting even worse. After being casted for the reality TV show College Hill his freshman year, “it made me super insecure because that was the blog era. It was giving ‘media takeout, Sandra Rose.’”
Between doing micro abrasion, facials, and other skin treatments, he found the solution to his skin concerns was much more simple than thousand dollar esthetician sessions. “Ty Hunter, who was Beyoncé’s stylist at the time, introduced me to vitamin c serums and I discovered shea butter in the streets of Harlem,” he says, two ingredients he later turned into Buttah Skin products. “I was an up-and-coming actor in LA and I really had to take care of my looks. My skin was still a problem for me, and I had finally got it under control.”
After his College Hill debut, his skin cleared up and people noticed. He recalls receiving DM’s from men asking for skincare tips before going live in his role on the Bounce TV sitcom In The Cut. This time, with healthy skin. “I wrote out a business plan in my dressing room, just a short one, and I said, ‘I’m going to take the next check and start a skincare line and see what it does,’” Renaud says.
So, in 2018, he founded Buttah Skin. “I had been an influencer before the influencer was influencing and getting pre facials,” he says, posting his facials and skincare routines online. But, it was the celebrities he was connected to—and invited to the spa—that really gave Buttah Skin a platform.
“At the time, I was around the Kardashians,” and, subsequently, learned a lot from them around how they grew their brands, he says. Since people respected what they built, his proximity made his brand easy to trust, too. “All of that gave me influence in the skincare world.”
But, ironically, he didn’t know much about skincare at all. “I knew nothing about skin care outside of the fact that I needed my skin to be perfect,” he says, with skincare brands offering him free facials for influencer reviews. With celebrity brands flooding the deeper skin tone market, from Rihanna’s Fenty Skin to Sabrina Elba’s S’Able Labs, finding solutions for his skin concerns, and those that looked like him, ended up being the foundation of Buttah Skin.
“I realized that we didn’t have any products when I went into Macy’s and when I went into these department stores,” he says, not being able to afford brands like Lumière de Vie while also noticing the lack of beauty products for darker skin. But after inviting Lauren London to host his launch event, having Cassie appear in his biggest campaign and even Beyoncé posting his skincare online, Renaud says, their sales went through the roof.
Then, the pandemic hit. “Production shut down, and all I could focus on was Buttah Skin,” he says. At the time, attention stemming from the Black Lives Matter movement was stirring around Black brands. “I ended up making history as the first Black man to go into Macy’s with a gender neutral line,” he recalls.
But despite this “overnight success”, Renaud says he was simultaneously not taken seriously and put into a “box of Blackness.” “When you create a box of products and you’re the face of the box of products and the CEO and the founder, you start feeling like that box of products,” he says. “I think that was a challenge for me and learning where to place my ego.”
Now, he’s taking a step back to reclaim his identity. “The decision to step away was more personal than business,” he says, missing his dream of being an actor. “A lot of times I wasn’t really present, and I really wanted happiness and peace in my life. I worked really hard for 5-6 years, and always had an exit plan.”
Even though it’s in the interest of his personal growth, he calls the move one of the hardest decisions of his life. “It had nothing to do with what was on paper and everything to do with my heart shifting,” he says, taking more time to build his life outside of his skincare line. “[I had to] remember that Buttah came from Dorion Renaud, Dorion Renaud didn’t come from Buttah,” he says. “Sometimes what was your ceiling will become your floor.”
Using his community as a cushion, Renaud says he’s most excited for pursuing his acting career and a new brand that’s coming out next year. “It’s going to be something that melanated people need. It’s going to solve a problem that we have been dealing with for a very long time,” he hints. “When you step out on faith, that could be scary. But then when you do it, there’s something on the other side of it.”
