Black Influencers Call Out Youthforia Makeup Brand Over ‘Minstrel Show Black’ Foundation Shade

Makeup brand Youthforia has received backlash for releasing a foundation shade that some Black influencers say resembles jet-black paint.

The brand originally released its Date Night Skin Tint Serum Foundation in August 2023, which included 15 shades. At the time, Youthforia received criticism for failing to include customers with darker skin tones in its shade range. As a response, it added 10 new shades to its foundation line last March, with options ranging from 250 light medium to 600 deep.

Youthforia started receiving backlash as customers began testing the product for themselves.

Beauty content creator Golloria George went viral for her recent review on TikTok. In a video that has racked up over 26 million views, she applied jet-black face paint on one cheek and the Youthforia foundation on the other to show the colors are nearly identical.

“When we say that we want you guys to make shades for us, we don’t mean to go to the lab and ask for minstrel show black,” George said. “What we mean is to take the browns that you have made, create undertones and do what you need to do in the lab so it’s a darker shade of brown.”

“I feel like the beauty industry itself has taken a step backward,” George said, according to NBC News. “We’ve seen so many complexion launches that would never work for a skin tone like mine.”

“It shows they don’t really care to put in effort, they don’t really care to include darker complexions, and we are an afterthought to them. Humans have undertones,” she added.

In fact, Youthforia’s newly released darkest shade only contains one pigment, as opposed to the rest of the foundation line. The 24 other options were formulated with at least three pigments each.

“This foundation literally only has pure black pigment,” Javon Ford, a beauty content creator and cosmetic chemist, said in a video posted on TikTok. “Anyone who has ever taken an art class will tell you that black is a terrible pigment to mix with, because it just makes things gray and muddy.”

The shade “600” does not reflect the diversity of undertones in darker complexions.

“What I feel like Youthforia did is ask their manufacturers to make the darkest shade possible,” Ford said. “But we all have different undertones.”