Aida Touré Is Taking Beauty Beyond the Face With Texture
Aida Touré, Founder of Texture. Courtesy of Aida Touré / Texture.
As brands like CYKLAR help usher in a new era of elevated body care, the Texture founder is pushing the conversation even further: the underarm.
Beauty has become remarkably sophisticated about the face.
We layer serums. We learn ingredients. We think about our skin barrier, hyperpigmentation, hydration, and sensitivity. Yet move just a few inches down the body, and that same level of consideration can disappear.
For Aida Touré, that disconnect became impossible to ignore.
Before Texture was a brand, Aida was trying to solve a problem in her own routine. She had sensitive underarm skin, experienced rashes from deodorants—including natural deodorants—and dealt with hyperpigmentation. But when she looked for something that actually focused on caring for the underarm skin, she found a category dominated by one thing.
“Literally everything that catered to the underarm was deodorant or antiperspirant.”
That realization became the beginning of a much bigger question:
Why weren’t we treating our underarms like skin?
When the Product You Need Doesn't Exist
Aida tried what many consumers do when the beauty aisle doesn't have an answer.
She experimented.
She tried using facial serums on her underarms. She explored familiar at-home remedies like lemon and turmeric. But beneath the experimentation lay a broader frustration: the available products weren't really addressing underarm skin as a distinct area of care.
Texture grew from that gap.
Its Skin Deep Underarm Serum approaches the area through the language we already understand when discussing skincare—tone, texture, moisture, and comfort—rather than treating the underarm solely as a place where odor and sweat need to be controlled.
That distinction is important.
Aida wasn't simply looking to create another deodorant. She was questioning why deodorant had become virtually synonymous with underarm care in the first place.
Body Care Is Having Its Skincare Moment
Aida isn't building in a vacuum.
The broader beauty industry has been steadily collapsing the old distinction between skincare and body care. Brands such as CYKLAR have helped make the body-care ritual feel more considered and elevated, bringing the sensoriality, ingredients and desirability once largely reserved for facial skincare further down the body.
Texture enters that evolution from a different angle.
Where much of the new body-care movement asks us to give the body the attention we've historically given the face, Aida takes the argument one step further: what about the parts of the body that still aren't really part of the conversation?
The underarm is an especially interesting example.
It's an area routinely shaved, exposed to friction and covered in product, yet the category built around it has historically centered overwhelmingly on sweat and odor.
Texture's opportunity isn't necessarily to compete with the new generation of elevated body-care brands. It's to make the underarm part of that larger evolution.
And in a beauty market increasingly interested in treating the body with the sophistication once reserved for the face, Aida's timing feels particularly relevant.
Beauty Beyond the Face
Aida describes Texture through a philosophy she calls “Beauty Beyond the Face.”
It feels particularly relevant at a moment when beauty consumers know more about their skin than ever before.
We scrutinize what goes onto our faces, yet areas of the body that experience shaving, friction, sensitivity and repeated product use haven't always received the same attention.
Texture's proposition is that they should.
And Aida's own experience makes that idea feel less like an invented brand position and more like the natural conclusion of years spent trying to find an answer for herself.
There is also something refreshing about a founder entering a category and questioning the premise rather than simply creating another version of what already exists.
Instead of asking how to make a better product within the existing definition of underarm care, Aida began by reconsidering the definition itself.
Underarms are skin.
Once you accept that, the category starts to look very different.
From Frustration to Reframing
That is ultimately what makes Aida's story interesting.
Texture sits at the intersection of a personal frustration and a larger shift happening in beauty: the expansion of sophisticated skincare thinking beyond the face.
For Aida, creating Texture meant taking an area of the body that beauty has historically approached through masking, controlling or correcting and asking what happens when we begin with care instead.
It's a small linguistic shift with potentially much larger implications.
Because innovation in beauty doesn't always require discovering an entirely new need.
Sometimes, it begins by looking at something we've been doing for decades and asking a better question.
For Aida Touré, that question started with her own skin.
And with Texture, she's inviting the rest of us to reconsider ours.
REFRΛME with Clèco: Aida Touré — Part I
In Part I, Aida Touré joins Clèco to discuss the personal experiences that led her to create Texture, the gap she saw in traditional underarm care, Skin Deep Underarm Serum, and why she believes beauty shouldn't stop at the face.
