- No human being on this planet is pure white or pure black. Everyone's skin has undertones. Even in the case of albinism, they have pink undertones. For melanism, the opposite of albinism, it's blue, possibly even red or green. NO ONE IS AS WHITE AS WHITE OUT OR AS BLACK AS A COMPUTER SCREEN.
If you don't know about the Youthforia controversy. You can find several videos and articles online, but I'll try my best to summarize.
Youthforia, is an indie brand makeup company. Last year, they launched their foundations which had a limited range. I can't find a picture that show their shades from last year, but an article I found said there was a total of 15 shades and within that total only 4 of the shades were medium deep to deep. This was of course called out by a lot of black and darker skinned beauty influencers. The company took down their first apology video (always a good sign🙄) and release another one basically promising that they'll do better.
Now I want to note here. No one expects every brand to have their shade. However, in the year of 2024 we do at least expect you to have about the same number of shades for each skin tone. 11 to 4 is downright disrespectful.
So moving on. In March, Youthforia expanded their foundation shades to 25. However, the shade that is getting talked about the most is Shade 600 deep which is literally PITCH BLACK. There is no other colors in it. It literally looks like black paint. Again, NO ONE IS PURE BLACK. We all have undertones.
So this has caused quite a lot of backlash to the company. They have been pulled from the shelves of some stores (not exactly sure if it's due to the backlash or lack of sales) and there have been talks of bankruptcy. So far the company has been keeping silent during this whole ordeal. No responding to news outlets and no social media posting.
Now two things went wrong here. One, Youthforia didn't seem to really understand what ppl were complaining about. Next, Youthforia didn't get the people who were complaining (ppl with darker skin tones) involved in the making of the foundation. I mean...technically they did, but literally within 5 days of launch, where it was too late to fix their fuck up.
Youthforia decided that the best way to make their darkest foundation was to make it first and THEN try to find a model that matches the foundation. You know, like how fashion designers make garments without checking the measurements of a model and just hope it fits /sarcasm.
Secondly Youthforia put too much focus on going as "dark as possible" and not enough on making sure shades were evenly distribute within each shade range. Even if they did somehow made 600 deep work, the shade range was still everywhere. Going from fair, light, medium, to deep, we have: 2 Fair, 8 Light, 8 Medium, and 6 Deep. Techincally, 5 since there is no way in hell anyone is using 600 deep unless you're doing a homestuck cosplay or going to a trump rally. On top of that quite a few of those mediums still look on the fairer side to me.
What sucks the most about all of this is that I know that black ppl are going to be blamed if this company goes under. When in reality this should be used as example as what not to do when trying to be "inclusive".