BGLH Marketplace
All photos by Curt Saunders for Black-Owned Brooklyn
A couple years back, our household committed to using only all-natural, Black-owned body products (bye, Vaseline and Jergens). Skin been shea butter glistenin’ ever since! Among our most prized moisturizers are the whipped butters — shea, cocoa and mango — from BGLH Marketplace , a quiet skincare emporium in Bed-Stuy. Owned by Leila Noelliste, the veteran blogger behind late-aughts natural hair website Black Girl With Long Hair, the shop is a direct extension of her influential website.
“I had a feeling that the blogging bubble was about to burst,” says Leila, 34, who started covering natural hair regimens and hair growth on Black Girl with Long Hair (BGLH) in 2008, soon earning more through banner ads than she did in her previous career as a Chicago newspaper reporter. “I started to see some cracks and realized I needed to do something else because this blogging thing was not going to last forever.”
Out of this necessity, in 2014 Leila began selling her line of handmade whipped body butters on BGLH. It was such a runaway success that, a year after moving from Chicago to Brooklyn, she opened a physical store in 2017. While the blog didn’t last — and although Leila wears her hair short these days — its name stuck, and BGLH Marketplace was born.
“We as Black business owners need to invest in Black communities before developers come in and change them slowly, with a big payoff.”
“As a natural hair blogger, I was doing research and development for my products without even knowing it,” says Leila, explaining the science and experimentation behind deep conditioning, stretching and strengthening. She put this incidental education toward making her natural shea, mango and cocoa butters, which she calls “miracle ingredients” for skin and hair. BGLH Marketplace offers them in 24 wide-ranging scents — from sweet-smelling coconut, grapefruit and mocha latte; to the refreshing lemongrass, peppermint and lavender; to the more rugged cedarwood, smoked tobacco & vanilla, and one literally called “the woods” — which you’re invited to test in the store.
With a light, fluffy texture that easily melts into the skin, and packaged with colorful labels proclaiming “Black is Beautiful” (her former blog’s tagline), Leila’s handmade butters are seriously nourishing. “They’re powerfully effective for both skin and hair,” says Leila. “If you want a clean and minimalist beauty routine, these are foundational.”
The first thing that hits you upon entering BGLH Marketplace is the clean, fresh scent. It’s part of the multisensory experience that Leila wants guests to have in what she calls an “ice cream shop for the body.” The sunny shop — which doubles as a showroom and a production space, where Leila and her team whip their body butters daily, using a row of hand mixers at the center of the room — has a strikingly minimalist aesthetic that lives up to the ice cream parlor concept.
Steps from the door sits a small table inviting visitors to try the shop’s 24 “flavors” of shea, cocoa and mango butters, with an array of mini containers to sniff and sample. Against a clean palette of white walls, exposed brickwork and natural wood floors, a long row of shelves carries hundreds of neatly stacked tubs, their rainbow of pastel-colored labels creating a soothing look and feel. It’s a tranquil getaway from the hustle and bustle of the city.
“We as Black business owners need to invest in Black communities before developers come in and change them slowly, with a big payoff,” Leila says of her Nipsey Hussle-esque business ethos. “We need to do our own version of that by investing in our neighborhoods with small businesses that contribute to improving their quality.”
358 Kosciuszko Street, 312-448-3343, bglh-marketplace.com
