Darkening your skin to impersonate a person of color is considered a particularly grotesque form of racism. And yet, in the past month alone, two beauty-world personalities have made headlines for doing just that. The first was Kim Kardashian. The second is blogger Vika Shapel, who recently teased a makeup tutorial wherein she and a friend transformed their “pasty pale” complexions to “deep chocolate skin tones” by coating their faces in chocolate. She dubbed it the “Chocolate Challenge.” (Cringe.)
Shapel announced her upcoming tutorial via a (now deleted) Instagram post: “Something fun is coming to YouTube, idk if there is a challenge like this but we haven’t seen it so Im (sic) calling it the chocolate challenge!” Shapel wrote on her (now defunct) Instagram page. “Come watch us transform into deep chocolate skin tones from our pasty pale.”
Soon, Shapel found herself at the center of a firestorm. Over the next few hours, a parade of social media users condemned the so-called “game.” Many were horrified that Shapel had manipulated the image so that the “chocolate” side of her face would have brown eyes.
“The Chocolate Challenge” is a funny way to spell blackface pic.twitter.com/NcqRfQ26xC
— LK (@_w0rmboy) July 10, 2017
this “challenge” doesn’t exist because people have common sense the disrespect… pic.twitter.com/j1SEXPdWhr
— Jasmine Brown (@JasMeannnn) July 9, 2017
So @vika97662612 decided to post this picture which is clearly blackface & she decided to call it “the chocolate challenge” pic.twitter.com/O4NutrEtTH
— Arnell (@arnellarmon) July 9, 2017
In a subsequent interview with Yahoo Beauty, Shapel pleaded ignorance, adding that she’d learned a lesson from the blackface episode. “I simply wanted to see how I looked in a deeper skin tone,” held the beauty blogger. “I wasn’t aware of the whole blackface concept before people began commenting it on the photo. I would like to apologize to people that were hurt or offended by my post, and it won’t happen again.”
Shapel has deactivated her social media accounts as she waits for the “overwhelming hateful responses” to die down. “I wasn’t an active social media user before; it was just whenever desire sparked, so whenever I have that, then I will come back,” she stated. Here’s hoping she uses her social media sabbatical to read up on the history of racism in America.
[ via Yahoo Beauty ]
