Sephora is Shutting all of its US Stores for an Hour Today

If you’re looking to hit up Sephora this morning for your favorite contouring kit or to find a new summer lip color, you might be surprised to find the doors shut and locked. Their corporate offices and distribution centers will also be shuttered.

The one hour closure is in response to an incident on April 30th in its Calabasas store.

Sephora’s Calabasas Store

According to US Weekly, singer SZA says that one of the store’s employees was racially profiling her when they called security to make sure she wasn’t stealing.

The Grammy-nominated celeb was trying to buy some Fenty products. The singer tweeted about what happened and later Rihanna sent her a Fenty gift card and a handwritten note.

The store issued a formal apology saying they were “gathering more information about the incident in order to take the proper next steps”.

The mega beauty store said they will “begin to train its staff Wednesday morning, promoting an open dialogue with employees on what it means to be inclusive.” The statement goes on to say,

“This store closure is part of a long journey in our aspiration to create a more inclusive beauty community and workplace, which has included forming employee resource groups, building Social Impact and philanthropic programs, and hosting inclusive mindset training for all supervisors”.

The company-wide inclusive training will discuss how to treat everyone the same despite gender identity, race and ethnicity, age and abilities. They will also add some outside improvements as well by including more diverse videos and images in the stores.

The brand recently launched a new campaign called “We Belong to Something Beautiful”, but says that the campaign was planned well before the April incident.

Hopefully the training and of course just plain human decency will prevent something like this from ever happening again.