As a cosmetologist, I can pursue a wide range of careers, including makeup. I am currently working in the hair industry, but little old me would have loved doing makeup. As much as I love the hair industry, my love for the beauty industry started with makeup. At 14, I was introduced to mascara, and it is still one of those things I cannot leave the house without. My current favorite is Milk Makeup’s KUSH High Roll Defining & Volumizing Tubing Mascara.
At 15, I started wearing Tarte’s Rainforest of the Sea foundation because a YouTuber I watched said they loved it (My oily skin hated it, but I didn’t know better). A little later, I got influenced to try Tarte’s Shape Tape concealer and I hated it! It looked awful, although it was my shade, my skin hated it. At 16, I got into eyeshadow and I tried simple looks and I tried so hard to do cut creases but I just never got the hang of it. To this day, I still struggle to find things that my skin agrees with in terms of not getting cakey, not pilling off my face, or keeping my oils away. Even with all of these struggles, I have never not been able to find a match to my skin tone and I will never have that struggle.
Recently, in the beauty community, the tiktoker Golloria has gone viral for her reviews of makeup products on her deep complexion. The most notable review she posted was that of the Youthforia Date Night Skin Tint Serum Foundation. The deepest and darkest shade is labeled as “Deep 495” and when she pulls it out of the box, it’s a medium-deep shade. After this stirred up the internet, the Youthforia founder posted a series of terrible apologies. They came out with a darker shade, “600”, which is compared to black face paint by many. When Youthforia first released its foundation in August of last year, there was outrage due to the lack of darker skin tones. They poorly expanded their shade range, and that is when Golloria’s review went viral. Then, they expanded it one more time and that is when they released their “600” shade.
I highly recommend watching Robert Welsh’s YouTube video about this, as he uses his experience as a makeup artist and references other creators who use their professional backgrounds to share how Youthforia should have handled the situation and used science to create a usable foundation for deeper complexions. On the other side of this, many people with fair skin have a hard time finding foundations that won’t make them look yellow or foundations with the wrong undertones, but it is far less common.
I’m not sure how makeup companies have not learned from shade range fails like that of Beauty Blender’s back in 2018, but makeup brands should not be using models with dark complexions when the foundation itself is not made for dark complexions. The shade sample on the product box should not be a completely different color than it is in the bottle. Brands should not be launching foundations with 20+ shades for light to medium complexions and 4 or 5 for deep complexions. Brands like Fenty Beauty and Haus Labs have a wide range of not only skin tones but undertones as well and if they can do it, so can someone else.