The entrepreneur | Winnie Harlow
A model who has graced the cover of Vogue, FASHION Magazine and Women’s Health, walked the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, featured in a Beyoncé music video and even received a shoutout on a Drake song, at 29 years old, Winnie Harlow is just getting started. Rising to fame in part and becoming an advocate as someone with the unique skin condition, vitiligo, Harlow has taken her advocacy and turned it into entrepreneurship. Last year, she launched inclusive skincare brand Cay Skin, influenced by her experience getting badly sunburned on set because of a photographer who didn’t want her to reapply sunscreen because of the white cast on skin. The suncare brand isn’t your average celebrity-founded beauty company — Harlow made headlines when she received US$4.1 million in venture capital funding for the brand, joining a short list of Black women who can say they’ve received over US$1 million in funding. And this year, her work in modeling, advocacy and entrepreneurship earned her the Global Citizen Award from the United Nations Association in Canada.
By Shan Boodram, Friend, sexologist & Netflix intimacy expert
In 2011, I received a Facebook friend request that stopped me in my tracks because I thought, “This Winnie Harlow person has such beautiful makeup!” Upon further inspection, I learned that Winnie’s beauty wasn’t from a brush, it was skin deep — she had a common skin condition called vitiligo that presented in an uncommonly symmetrical way on her face and body. At the time I ran a women’s empowerment blog, so I messaged Winnie to see if she was open to being interviewed. When we met in person to conduct her first photo shoot, I then learned that her beauty, kindness and potential went much, much deeper than the eye could see. Today, Winnie is Canada’s most successful supermodel. She is a cover girl who could now make a book of her achievements. She is a proud Jamaican-Canadian woman who made Cay Skin, so that everyone under the sun could love the skin they’re in, and she’s also now the recipient of the United Nations Association of Canada Global Citizen Award for her incredible work as an entrepreneur. I’d love to say I knew it all along, but you can’t predict what didn’t seem possible, and Winnie has made an incredible career out of strutting past the impossible.
For more of Toronto’s most inspiring women of 2023, click here.