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Style > Beauty

People Are Massively Underwhelmed By Beautyblender’s ‘Inclusive’ Foundation Shade Range

Erica Kam

You may know Beautyblender simply as the tool you use to apply your foundation, but now they’re hoping to become a makeup company in their own right by debuting the BOUNCE Liquid Whip Long Wear Foundation this month. And, well… they’re off to a rocky start, to say the least.

The BOUNCE Foundation has a range of 32 shades, which seems impressive at first glance, but numbers are just numbers. So how do the shades themselves stack up? Perfectly—if you’re light-skinned, that is.

 

Haylee Aníse, a YouTuber, Tweeted about the shade range’s swatches, saying, “The swatches make this so much funnier.” And she’s right; looking at the 32 shades, it looks like only the last six or seven could really be meant for people with darker skin tones, and even then, the darkest shade would still be way too light for a lot of people. Other Twitter users were also unsatisfied.

 

Allure reports that Beautyblender is aware of the negative response and gave a statement to Cosmopolitan.

“Our founder, Rea Ann Silva, is not only Latina, but a professional makeup artist working primarily with women of colour- so she is an expert in this colour range,” the statement reads. “Those with tan, deep and dark skin tones understand that finding the right colour foundation is all about matching your undertone and this is where Rea Ann saw the biggest hole in the market – for women like herself and her multicultural family. BOUNCE offers a wide variety of undertones from neutral, warm, cool, and olive and a special ultramarine blue to create a deep rich tone.”

According to Cosmopolitan, Beautyblender also commented on Instagram that the initial post about the foundation, from Instagram user @trendmood1, had a “wacky filter” that made the shades appear differently. The page then posted a second photo of the foundation in a different filter, but people weren’t convinced.

 

Now that the foundation has launched, I know I’ll be waiting for all the YouTube review videos, especially those from women of color with darker skin. Both Allure and Cosmopolitan mentioned that it’s hard to tell the truth from the pictures, but it’s still fair to hold Beautyblender to a high standard of inclusivity, now that mainstream makeup brands have finally realized the need for a diverse range of shades, not just a large number of them.

Erica Kam is the Life Editor at Her Campus. She oversees the life, career, and news verticals on the site, including academics, experience, high school, money, work, and Her20s coverage. Over her six years at Her Campus, Erica has served in various editorial roles on the national team, including as the previous Culture Editor and as an editorial intern. She has also interned at Bustle Digital Group, where she covered entertainment news for Bustle and Elite Daily. She graduated in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing from Barnard College, where she was the senior editor of Columbia and Barnard’s Her Campus chapter and a deputy copy editor for The Columbia Spectator. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her dissecting K-pop music videos for easter eggs and rereading Jane Austen novels. She also loves exploring her home, the best city in the world — and if you think that's not NYC, she's willing to fight you on it.