Let's face it, we all wish we lived in a world in which beauty brands all had the same universal system for naming their complexion shades — it would make shopping across the board so much easier. But we don't, so every time we want to try out a new foundation we find ourselves getting shade matched all over again. Beauty YouTuber Jackie Aina feels our plight, and she's just as over it as we are.
So she's doing something about it and creating informative videos where she mixes tons of foundations with the same shade name to show the serious divide in the beauty industry. Our beauty godmother posted yet another video, but this time it's 'chesnut' shades that are getting the attention.
Jackie Aina is back for another foundation mixing video.
In what's now almost a full series of videos, Aina mixes a boat load of foundations with the same shade name to see if all foundation shades are really created equal. Almost every time, she's disappointed in the selection and finds herself criticizing brands for deeper shade ranges that really aren't that deep at all.
Well, she did it again, this time with the shade name "chesnut."
And as you can expect, she wasn't impressed this go-round either.
With every drop of foundation, Aina found herself more and more confused by what "chesnut" means to different brands. In most cases, the shade name marked the deepest end of the range ands still managed to be too light for Aina. Some shades she even referred to as her "highlighter shade."
Yikes.
Many of the deeper shades weren't actually deep... At all.
Stacked up against each other, the vast majority of shades looked completely different. There was only one foundation that Aina considered truly be brown enough to be "deep," and even that one, she said, had an undertone that was anything but desirable for richer skin.
And as the colors began being mixed, Aina became more concerned.
As more and more too-light shades were added to Aina's mixing board, the concern grew that the resulting color would make Aina look like a ghost of sorts, and she wasn't afraid to say it. Even the most luxury and most notable of formulas got called out for their lack of shade range and unacceptable undertones.
No progress was made.
Aina began to question if brands even put any thought into shade names at all. "If its not chestnut its mocha… and lets not forget about toffee or espresso," said a commenter below the video who was also fed up with shades for brown women all having the same, redundant, food-related names.
The colors were so vastly different.
From the varying undertones to the opposing formulas, it really was a whole new world for Aina who made it a point to note that most of the foundations used were formulas she's not too familiar with.
"I can honestly say for the first time that these are mostly foundations that I've never worn… Pink is my favorite color, but not in foundation," she said.
And the swatches could have basically made a whole shade range in themselves.
"I feel like I can never really get over how different every single shade looks," she said while shaking her head. "I think I was the most disappointed in Jouer's lineup because that's the foundation that I was looking forward to trying."
Jouer has a shade range of 50, making her assertion even more surprising.
After she swatched each shade separately, it was finally mixing time.
Auntie Jackie wasn't optimistic, and neither were we. After years of following Aina's channel, we can say that we're pretty familiar with what foundation shades will and won't work with her rich skin tone. While she mixed all the foundations together, it was obvious that the color created wasn't going to be one of those shades.
But we were pleasantly surprised, kind of.
Though Jackie wasn't completely put off by the combined color, she said the shade was a bit too neutral. However, what Aina did love was the formula. She said the foundation felt better than any formula she'd tried before. That's not hard to believe seeing as she mixed some of the most prestige foundations out there to create the combination.
Aina, who "had some place to go" immediately removed the visibly wrong shade — which ultimately had nothing to do with the actual color "chesnut."
In fact, we didn't even get to see it on for a minute before she whipped out the makeup wipes.
So from this point forward, we hope brands will use better judgement when creating shade names. In fact, it may behoove them to completely stop naming black women's skin tones after food names at all. We don't see fairer shades being named "egg" or "oatmeal." Just saying.
