update 2 ::slotted

::slotted is now supported by all new browsers and can be used with ViewEncapsulation.ShadowDom

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::slotted

update 1 ::ng-deep

/deep/ was deprecated and replaced by ::ng-deep.

::ng-deep is also already marked deprecated, but there is no replacement available yet.

When ViewEncapsulation.Native is properly supported by all browsers and supports styling accross shadow DOM boundaries, ::ng-deep will probably be discontinued.

original

Angular adds all kinds of CSS classes to the HTML it adds to the DOM to emulate shadow DOM CSS encapsulation to prevent styles of bleeding in and out of components. Angular also rewrites the CSS you add to match these added classes. For HTML added using [innerHTML] these classes are not added and the rewritten CSS doesn't match.

As a workaround try

• for CSS added to the component

/* :host /deep/ mySelector { */
:host ::ng-deep mySelector { 
  background-color: blue;
}

• for CSS added to index.html

/* body /deep/ mySelector { */
body ::ng-deep mySelector {
  background-color: green;
}

>>> (and the equivalent/deep/ but /deep/ works better with SASS) and ::shadow were added in 2.0.0-beta.10. They are similar to the shadow DOM CSS combinators (which are deprecated) and only work with encapsulation: ViewEncapsulation.Emulated which is the default in Angular2. They probably also work with ViewEncapsulation.None but are then only ignored because they are not necessary. These combinators are only an intermediate solution until more advanced features for cross-component styling is supported.

Another approach is to use

@Component({
  ...
  encapsulation: ViewEncapsulation.None,
})

for all components that block your CSS (depends on where you add the CSS and where the HTML is that you want to style - might be all components in your application)

Update

Example Plunker

The simple solution you need to follow is

import { DomSanitizer } from '@angular/platform-browser';

constructor(private sanitizer: DomSanitizer){}

transformYourHtml(htmlTextWithStyle) {
    return this.sanitizer.bypassSecurityTrustHtml(htmlTextWithStyle);
}

We pull in content frequently from our CMS as [innerHTML]="content.title". We place the necessary classes in the application's root styles.scss file rather than in the component's scss file. Our CMS purposely strips out in-line styles so we must have prepared classes that the author can use in their content. Remember using {{content.title}} in the template will not render html from the content.