This Beauty Blogger's Videos Address A Huge Issue In The Makeup Industry

No one likes shopping for foundation — so, can you imagine how much worse it would be if no one ever carried your shade? Beauty blogger Nyma Tang tackles colorism in "The Darkest Shade" — a YouTube series where she reviews the darkest shade available for various different brands of makeup. The series seeks to help women with darker skin tones find good foundation options, both in terms of shade and skin type — while also elucidating basic colorism for those who don't have to experience it, and calling on makeup companies to create more inclusive shade selections.

In her series so far, she's tackled brands high end names to drugstore favorites, from Bobbi Brown and Lancome, to NYX Cosmetics and LA Girl. She's also taken on cult favorited products, like the KKW Beauty Creme Contour Kit — in her reviews, she is very frank when it comes to taking beauty companies to task, but she's never unfair or cruel. She's also careful to list the pros and cons of each product, while also talking about which skin tones it might suit best.

In the aforementioned video on KKW Beauty, she even talks about how she initially didn't want to review it (she could tell by looking that it wouldn't be dark enough), but decided to anyway, to shed light on the unfair situation. "When products that are considered 'contour' launch, the deeper side of the spectrum is completely left out most of the time. I was compelled to do this not only because a lot of you guys wanted me to do it, but because if I didn't do it, the darker side of the spectrum is just going to keep on going unnoticed," she says in her review, later concluding, "We need people with my skin tone to do videos like this."

If you watch the video, you'll even see her laugh out loud upon realizing that the darker contour shade almost works as a highlighter on her skin tone.

In a video about Maybelline's popular Fit Me! Matte and Poreless Foundation, she illuminates another problem with the way cosmetics companies treat women with darker skin tonesx: "The darker shades of certain makeup aren't available in all the stores. You can kind of tell which store's going to have it depending on demographic, and it's really frustrating ... I don't think it's fair to have all the other shades but then cut off the darkest few shades and not have them available in all stores."

As if that weren't bad enough, there's also a particularly depressing video where Tang reviews a "custom matched" foundation shade that's clearly about 10 shades too pale, with a grayish tint to boot.

At the end of the day, there's a lot of empowerment in Tang's videos — she has the upbeat bubbly personality and mad makeup skills of all your other favorite beauty bloggers out there, while also shedding light on very important issues. Take her closing words on her KKW Beauty review, for example:

I'm glad that I can bring some sort of awareness to this specific beauty product. I know there's a lot of dark-skinned girls that can understand and relate to this video. It can be really disheartening to people to not be included, to not be considered — it would make you feel like there's something wrong with you. And I'm here to say, there's nothing wrong with you.