Four beauty editors have come together to create Donate Beauty (@donatebeauty), a grassroots donation project that has already served 30,000 healthcare workers across the country with personal care products since the COVID-19 outbreak started in mid-March. Founded by Cheryl Wischhover, a freelance reporter for VOX and Business of Fashion; Kathleen Hou, Beauty Director for The Cut; Kristina Rodulfo, Beauty Director for Women’s Health Magazine; and Caroline Moss, an author and podcaster, the organization may be modest in size but reach is vast and impactful. While healthcare workers are navigating the longest and most brutal hours during the pandemic, Donate Beauty is busy fielding hundreds of donation offers for essential items such as lip balms, hand creams, body lotions and facial cleansers from the likes of Peach and Lily, Elemis, Clarins, Sunday Riley, Elizabeth Arden, Supergoop and Kora Organics, to name a few.
Beauty News recently spoke with Cheryl about the tweet that prompted an outpouring of support from brands, and whether Donate Beauty will continue into the future.
Beauty News: How did this effort first come together?
Cheryl Wischhover: I was a nurse practitioner for 18 years before I changed careers about a decade ago. Julia Rubin, one of my colleagues at VOX, messaged me asking if we could somehow mobilize the industry after a doctor friend told her that the face masks at the hospital were making their skin break out. Her friend asked if she knew any brands that were offering discounts for nurses and doctors. So I quickly sent out a tweet on March 19 asking brands and beauty editors for help with product donations. I was bombarded immediately with hundreds of offers from brands and also more requests from hospital workers. By the next day Kathleen, Kristina and Caroline had volunteered to join me. We created a massive spreadsheet with emails and contacts soon after. So, it literally came together in less than 24 hours.
BN: How many people are working on this effort?
CW: It’s just the four of us right now, but another beauty editor just reached out who’s going to help once a week with data entry stuff. We’re very grassroots and unofficial. We’re not a registered 501c(3) or anything. It’s very scrappy. We’re working on a website now that we’re hoping will be live soon.
BN: Are there any stats you can share on what you’ve accomplished?
CW: It is so amazing how generous brands have been. About 140,000 products have shipped to more than 400 hospitals from over 170 brands, serving about 30,000 healthcare workers. It’s a lot, and it’s just the four of us working several hours a day on this, on top of whatever else we’re doing for work. I know we all feel really helpless in this crisis, and this has been an amazing project to focus on and give us purpose. We hope the deliveries are not just helping recipients’ skin, but also their morale.
BN: How are you publicizing the Donate Beauty objective?
CW: We started asking people who we knew first – any family or friends that worked in hospitals, including a lot of my former colleagues in healthcare. We asked them to send us their information, how many people work in their units, etc. For instance, Kristina’s mother is a nurse who’s currently working on the frontlines.
Once we got our Instagram up and running we got even more offers. We haven’t called in many favors to brands at all. That said, we have reached out to some larger brands for help because we know they have the volume. But 98 percent of the time they’ve come to us to donate anywhere from 15 to 28,000 products in one shot.
BN: Talk about your logistics a bit. Are products first sent to a single destination? How are they delivered to hospitals?
CW: We have no base of operation right now where products are initially received, so the brands are doing the heavy lifting, to their credit. We have a form now for healthcare workers to fill out in order to receive a beauty care package. We ask for their name, hospital name, phone number, address, size of their unit, and hospital ID for vetting purposes.
Then, when a brand reaches out and says, we’d like to donate 400 hand creams, we usually ask them if they’re willing to ship out multiple packages directly. We have all the hospital information in our big spreadsheet, so we give them the breakdown as far as how many products go to how many different destinations. Every single one of the brands has been super cooperative on this. The hospitals then receive the products and distribute them as they like.
BN: Do you plan on continuing Donate Beauty beyond the pandemic?
CW: Yes, we have thought about it, but we haven’t really discussed it in full yet. We want to see how far we can take this effort first, and then decide what the future looks like.
If you know a healthcare worker on the frontlines in need of personal care products, please email hospitalbeautydonations@gmail.com.
For additional information, please click here to visit the website which was designed by BASE Beauty.