When Branding Meets Sacred Water
What EADEM’s Mami Wata mist reveals about lineage, syncretism, and the politics of naming the sacred.
Image courtesy of EADEM
EADEM named a face mist after Mami Wata and the internet split wide open. Fear, pride, confusion, celebration all at once. Beneath the noise lives a question worth sitting with: what shifts when a spirit shaped by centuries of movement and memory shows up on a beauty shelf?
This piece offers clarity, context, and cultural literacy.
The Brand Behind the Conversation
EADEM, founded by Marie Kouadio Amouzame (French-Ivorian) and Alice Lin Glover (Taiwanese-American) creates gentle, intentional skincare for melanin-rich skin. Their Mami Wata Ultra-Calming Rescue Mist draws on symbolism that feels intuitive: water soothes, protects, clarifies.
Sacred names, though, carry weight. Especially this one.
The Ancient Water Deities: Oshun, Yemoja, Olokun
Before we can understand Mami Wata, we need to know what came before her.
West Africa has venerated water deities for millennia. In Yoruba cosmology, these spirits hold specific roles, territories, and protocols:
Oshun: goddess of rivers, fertility, love, and wealth. Associated with sweetness, femininity, and divine sensuality. Her devotion centers around the Osun River in Nigeria. She appears in gold and amber, honey and copper.
Yemoja (Yemaya): mother of waters, protector of women and children. She governs the surface of the ocean, childbirth, and maternal care. Draped in blue and white, cowrie shells marking her presence.
Olokun: deity of the ocean's depths, androgynous or gender-fluid depending on region. Controls wealth from the sea, secrets hidden below the surface, the mysteries humans can't reach. Often depicted with a veiled face, surrounded by coral and treasure.
These are structured traditions with priesthoods, initiation rites, consecrated shrines, and centuries of unbroken practice. They crossed the Atlantic through enslaved peoples and took root in the Americas: Santería, Candomblé, Lucumí, Vodou. Their worship remained intact, codified, traceable.
Mami Wata emerged differently.
Understanding Mami Wata
Many people assume she's an ancient pan-African goddess, unchanged across millennia. History tells a different story.
She's syncretic. Modern. Born from contact.
Between the 15th and 19th centuries, several worlds collided: European mermaid imagery arriving through maritime trade, a widely distributed German chromolithograph of a South Asian snake charmer (now in the Smithsonian collection), longstanding West and Central African water-spirit traditions, and a pidgin English name: "Mammy Water," which became "Mami Wata."
She belongs to no single ethnic group or cosmology. Pan-African, trans-Atlantic, deliberately fluid, that's her nature.
A Spirit That Travels
Water knowledge survived the Middle Passage. She resurfaced under new names, new forms:
La Sirène in Haitian Vodou
Mama Dlo in Trinidad
Unlike structured orisha worship, Mami Wata devotion tends toward the personal, the intuitive. That's part of what makes her powerful. And controversial.
Why She Divides Opinion
Mami Wata embodies themes that unsettle modern sensibilities. Beauty and danger coexist in her. So do wealth and desire. She shapeshifts across gender, across form. Protector and disruptor, depending on the day.
Some call her a "capitalist deity", a spirit deeply entangled with wealth and attraction. In many Pentecostal traditions, she's feared as a "marine spirit," coded demonic.
She lives in the tension between attraction and taboo, devotion and suspicion.
Why EADEM's Naming Hit a Nerve
On the surface, the alignment makes sense: a calming mist, a founder who grew up with water-spirit stories, a brand rooted in heritage.
The friction appears when you zoom out.
Sacred names appearing as $44 products at Sephora raise questions about access, ownership, and transformation. Shared marginalization doesn't automatically grant shared mythology. Continental interpretations clash with diaspora ones. Spiritual practitioners and cultural commentators rarely agree on what's permissible. And when heritage becomes marketing, the question of who benefits gets complicated fast.
There's no single legitimate answer here. Just layered truths.
The Debate, Distilled
On TikTok, people landed in different places:
Some see reclamation: visibility for heritage that's been suppressed, a source of pride.
Others see extraction: sacred symbols reduced to commercial assets, spirituality flattened into aesthetics.
Some feel fear: real spiritual danger, especially in Pentecostal contexts where "marine spirits" carry serious weight.
And some see evolution: Mami Wata has always been hybrid. Change is intrinsic to her story.
Each position brings its own history, its own internal logic.
What This Moment Reveals
The EADEM debate acts as a mirror, reflecting currents larger than skincare:
How colonial religions fractured African spiritual memory. How diaspora identities negotiate what was lost and what survived. How capitalism absorbs spiritual symbols and repackages them. How modern spirituality resists clean categories.
Mami Wata has always existed in the in-between: between origin and reinvention, ocean and river, devotion and commerce. Her name was always going to spark this conversation.
The Subtile Question
EADEM approached the name with intention. The symbolism aligns. The story holds together.
Intention, though, doesn't dissolve complexity.
When the sacred enters consumer culture, visibility and extraction can coexist. Reclamation can sit uncomfortably close to appropriation. Honoring can double as marketing.
Mami Wata is fluid. So are the answers.
Where do you land?
