Yesterday, Nikkie Tutorials posted the first YouTube review of Tarte's highly anticipated Shape Tape Foundation.
The review itself, which could only have come from a solid brand-influencer relationship or a paid promotion, determined the foundation has a much lighter coverage than advertised.
But Nikkie failed to address one extremely important thing in her video: Tarte's shade range...
... Which has been getting heavily criticized for its narrow and extremely light shade range.
And Nikkie's fans were SURE to let her know how upset they were to see her completely ignore the elephant in the room.
Because a lot of her fans don't even have the option to wear the foundation because there isn't a shade deep enough for them.
Shortly after uploading, Nikkie completely removed her review from the internet — but with good reason.
"The Tarte shade range is an absolute mess and I should've spoken up about it more than I did," she wrote.
"I'm putting it offline because Tarte should work on releasing inclusive shades, instead of cashing in on this mess-up first."
For an influencer of Nikkie's caliber, this is a huge — and fantastic — move.
To put things in perspective, Nikkie is one of the most powerful influencers in the world — and she makes a LOT of her money from brand partnerships. Her relationships with brands like Tarte, which give her dibs on exclusive reviews, are essential to her career.
Like many other white influencers have done and continue to do, she very easily could have brushed the backlash off and left her review online, but she risked her brand relationship for the betterment of someone different than her. That's pretty damn cool.
But influencers of color have been pointing out these exclusionary products for AGES — it's about time light-skinned influencers started to join in.
At the risk of sounding extremely cliche, if the beauty industry's going to continue changing to accept deeper skin tones, influencers of ALL backgrounds are going to have to learn the hell up and call brands out when necessary.
So now it's time to see who else doesn't bring up Tarte's shade range in their reviews.
We'll be watching.
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