In the past few years, the beauty community has been bigger than it has ever been. More and more people are becoming invested in the beauty community and watching their videos. According to Statista, there has been an increase of over 80 billion views on beauty videos on Youtube since 2009. Influencers such as Jeffree Star, James Charles and Laura Lee are all main people who have tons of influence on the beauty community, and this can come at a cost.

Some influencers don’t always use their impact in a good way. These days, I feel as if some bad experiences come to the surface aren’t truly recognized by the influencers. For example, Laura Lee’s racist comments on Twitter that showed her racist remarks from years ago. She made a video about them, obviously trying to cover up the whole situation but trying to make people think she actually cared. This failed due to her terrible acting. She then lost tons of subscribers and hasn’t really recovered since.

Personally, I feel as if she doesn’t deserve the recovery because if you have racist actions, whether it be from the past or the present, you shouldn’t get any sympathy whatsoever.

Another common situation in the beauty community is the amount of foundation shades companies come out with these days. It’s very taboo if you come out with a line that doesn’t include or try to include a wide range of skin colors, then your line is shunned from everyone in the community. Some companies try to come up with excuses such as “It’s hard to formulate darker skin tones,” when it reality, it takes about 5 minutes, according to a recent video posted by James Charles.

In the video, Charles starts with his foundation. He sees that it’s only a combination of four pigments: white, red, yellow and black. It takes him less than 10 mins to make his shade. He states that some people make excuses about how hard it is to make some skin shades, yet it just took him almost zero effort to make his own.

Many artists try to battle the racism in the community, but it doesn’t shine through most of the time. People like Jeffree Star continue to call out companies that aren’t inclusive enough and praise the ones who are. An example is his review of the Beauty Blender foundation line that came out this year. It was highly criticized for its small coverage of the darker tones with extensive coverage of paler shades. He called them out and he caused many people to shun their line. These actions however, don’t always get through to the community as a whole. It’s still seen as a group that has a problem with racism, and that they continue to allow it.

I give no sympathy to racist tendencies from the beauty industry. Even if it was from 10 years ago, people have to own up to it the horrible things they have done. Excuses should never be allowed and they are pathetic.