A couple days ago, a beauty blogger named Golloria George showed up on my FYP holding a bottle of black face paint and a bottle of similarly dark foundation, which she called “tar in a bottle.” This was the first I’d heard of the backlash. Then the rest of my TikTok ecosystem seemed to join in steadily over the rest of the day. The makeup side of TikTok is rallying together against beauty brand Youthforia’s black foundation drop from March.
This story begins in August of last year, when Youthforia, a brand that launched during the pandemic with a color-changing blush oil, dropped a foundation product that was met a lot of backlash for its limited shade range. This is obviously a common issue in the makeup space, albeit one we see much less often across the industry ever since the release of Fenty Beauty’s first-of-its-kind complexion line. Nevertheless, Youthforia’s founder Fiona Chan responded to this backlash in a now-deleted TikTok. “It was always my intention to launch this as a proof of concept to see if people even liked the base formula,” she said. Fair enough, though the initial shade range only extended to a medium brown and left darker skinned consumers upset to be an afterthought.
Then March, Youthforia launched ten new shades, the darkest one, Shade 600, being very close to jet black. Largely, the makeup community online is not having it. It should be stated that there are some people online who are defending the shade in the comments of these videos, writing, “not this again, there’s people with this shade, just pick up a lighter shade if the shade is too dark for you. there’s multiple videos of people using the darkest shade and it matching them perfectly.” And sure that may be true, but we can’t even confirm because to our knowledge, we haven’t actually seen a single person on TikTok show that the product matches them. The founder also posted a video saying she was struggling to find a model who matched their darkest shade when shooting the campaign. In the video, she also showed how much darker Youthforia’s foundation was compared to Fenty’s darkest shade, perhaps in an attempt to overcorrect the blowback from August of last year.
Then an employee of Youthforia reached out to a collection of their “insider crew” of brand ambassadors, explaining the thought process behind Shade 600. In the message, they also asked their insiders to comment with positivity on videos they see criticizing it. The beauty blogger who posted it, Wumi Afuye, also showed footage of the Black models they found at a mall in Dubai, where the foundation very clearly does not match them.
There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said. At the end of the day, the Youthforia team seems to have attempted to make an even darker shade of foundation than is already on the market, and in doing so, they seem to have further alienated a consumer base that already felt slighted by the lack of inclusion in the first drop.
