How MissDarcei Turned “Black Girl Tries” Into Beauty Industry Change

https://youtu.be/ZPGER4JokC0

By the time MissDarcei and I settled into our Zoom conversation, I had already spent plenty of time watching her Black Girl Tries videos. The premise is deceptively simple: take a beauty look, product, trend, or technique that was not necessarily created with a Black woman in mind and try it anyway. Indian bridal makeup. K-pop star makeup. Korean foundations. Celebrity beauty routines. Nothing is automatically off limits.

What makes the series compelling, though, is that MissDarcei rarely seems interested in proving that something won’t work. More often, she wants to find out what happens when she ignores the assumption that it cannot.

That curiosity has followed her from the earliest days of her career. Born and raised in Toronto, MissDarcei began uploading beauty videos to YouTube around 2010, long before “content creator” had become the viable career path it is today. She was a teenager showing viewers her drugstore hauls, outfits she wore to school, makeup, and whatever else interested her at the time. There was no grand strategy behind it. It was simply fun.

Back then, she remembers, almost nobody was getting online with the deliberate intention of making social media their full-time job. At most, a creator might receive some free products. So MissDarcei taught herself everything—how to film, light, and edit her own videos—not because she thought she was building a business, but because she enjoyed making them.

Years later, that same instinct to experiment would give her the idea that changed the trajectory of her platform.

At the time, a trend was circulating online in which creators recreated makeup looks from celebrities or influencers who already resembled them. A blonde, fair-skinned creator might try a Taylor Swift tutorial, for example. MissDarcei wondered what would happen if she did exactly the opposite.

She had already been watching Korean beauty creators alongside American ones, seeking out videos with subtitles whenever possible. She loved the makeup, but there was an assumption lingering in the back of her mind: those looks were beautiful, but surely they were not meant for her. The colors might look ashy. The techniques might not translate. The finished makeup might simply look terrible.

That, she thought, could make for a funny video.

So she tried it.

There was no test run beforehand. MissDarcei filmed herself following the tutorial in real time, discovering the result at exactly the same moment as her audience would. And then something unexpected happened: the makeup actually looked good.

The comments agreed.

What had begun as a joke suddenly revealed something much more interesting. The appeal of Black Girl Tries became almost suspenseful. MissDarcei did not know how the experiment would turn out, and neither did the viewer. Both were discovering the answer together.

But underneath that entertainment was a larger idea—one connected to experiences MissDarcei had been having long before she ever picked up a camera.

As a child, she was a competitive dancer. When she needed foundation, finding a shade did not involve carefully comparing an expansive range. She knew exactly where to go.

“I didn’t have to look,” she recalled. “I would just go to the end and pick up that one.”

Beauty, she remembers, often seemed divided into two worlds: products for Black people and products for everybody else. There were designated aisles, designated shades, and an unspoken understanding that some things simply were not intended for her.

Black Girl Tries challenged that understanding in the most straightforward way possible: by trying them anyway.

“I am allowed to try these things. There’s no law saying that I can’t try this type of makeup, or this hair product, or this clothing style or whatever… You are allowed to do those things. You are allowed to explore. And you don’t have to be in this little box that society wants to put you in.”

As she said it, I realized that this is perhaps the most consequential part of MissDarcei’s work. Her videos do not simply ask beauty companies to make more products. They question the boundaries consumers have been conditioned to place around themselves.

And eventually, one of those experiments did more than question the industry. It changed something within it.

MissDarcei had been trying Korean makeup for years by the time she encountered TIRTIR’s cushion foundation. At the time, Korean complexion products routinely offered only a handful of shades, and nine shades already represented a comparatively significant range for a K-beauty brand.

At a beauty event near her home in Toronto, MissDarcei was the only Black attendee. Guests were receiving a TIRTIR PR box containing those nine foundation shades—but not her. There was a practical explanation: none of them matched her complexion.

She asked for the box anyway.

Back home, the idea for another video arrived in characteristic MissDarcei fashion: this is going to be funny.

She tried the foundation on camera. The video exploded.

Then TIRTIR contacted her.

The brand wanted to create darker shades and asked if she would work with them.

“I was like, what is going on? Because I feel like it was such a big video, especially when they responded, because [brands] don’t respond to stuff like that.”

That response mattered almost as much as the original video. MissDarcei had seen criticism directed toward brands before. Too often, she says, nothing happened. There might be discussion, disappointment, and public pressure, but rarely visible action.

This time was different.

“This was the first time that something actually happened. And people were like, ‘Whoa…what is going on?’ Especially a Korean brand…we’ve never seen this, period. And then a Korean brand swoops in and they’re like, ‘Hey…I actually want to change,’ which is really cool.”

MissDarcei later became a TIRTIR brand ambassador, although she is careful to clarify that she did not directly develop the expanded shades herself. What she witnessed, however, was the ripple effect. In her view, TIRTIR’s willingness to prioritize expansion and inclusion helped establish it as a pioneer within K-beauty—and encouraged others to follow.

The significance is particularly striking when considering how long MissDarcei has occupied the intersection between Black beauty and Korean beauty.

Her interest in Korean culture began early. She had been listening to K-pop and watching K-dramas since she was around 13 or 14. When she became increasingly interested in makeup during the full-glam beauty boom of 2016—the era of cut creases, glitter, contour, and highlighter—discovering Korean makeup felt like a natural extension of something she already loved.

She was also realistic. She knew many of the products were not being formulated or marketed with darker skin in mind. She bought what she thought might work and experimented with the rest.

Years ago, finding those products in North America often required seeking out specialty stores or heading into Koreatown. Today, K-beauty occupies shelves at major retailers such as Ulta and Sephora. To MissDarcei, that evolution reinforces something she understood well before the category became mainstream.

“I always knew…the issue wasn’t the products, it was the marketing.”

A brand could create darker shades, she explains, but if it failed to reach the consumers those shades were meant for, they would not sell. Products would be discontinued, and the lack of sales could then appear to validate the assumption that the audience was never there.

Representation, in other words, requires more than adding a color to the end of a shade chart. It requires understanding the person who is supposed to wear it.

MissDarcei discovered just how technically involved that work can be when she collaborated with Korean beauty brand Parnell.

Unlike her role with TIRTIR, this time she worked directly on the shades themselves. Parnell already had a 30-shade foundation range, but few meaningful options for deeper complexions. MissDarcei worked with the company to develop ten additional dark shades, eventually traveling to its lab in Korea and working with the team responsible for creating them.

The process quickly demonstrated why inclusivity cannot simply mean taking an existing shade and making it darker.

Undertones mattered.

Living in Canada while the team worked in Korea, MissDarcei received samples, tested them on herself and on paper, and returned detailed notes: this shade was too yellow; another too pink; another too orange. The team would revise them and send them back.

When she eventually visited the lab, the chemists told her they had never done anything quite like it.

Korean foundation development traditionally operates around an established numbering system—shades such as 21, 23, or 24. For this collaboration, the team had to move outside that familiar framework and formulate entirely new tones. Her feedback forced them to solve new problems: how much more yellow should a shade become? How much red? How much orange?

“They had to figure that out based on my feedback. And I thought that was so cool…they had to just completely figure it out. All these new shades.”

There is something fitting about the progression.

MissDarcei started as a teenager sitting in her room, experimenting with products that often were not made with her in mind. Years later, she found herself inside a cosmetics laboratory helping chemists formulate shades that had not existed within their system before.

The connective tissue between those two moments is experimentation.

When I asked what she would tell someone who has ever been made to feel that their complexion—or, more broadly, their identity—is too difficult for an industry or creative space to accommodate, her answer returned to the same principle that has powered Black Girl Tries from the beginning.

“It’s really just about having the courage to try. That’s what I figured out…it’s not scary. It’s just for fun. And especially with what I’m doing, it’s literally just makeup. It’s just a fun, creative expression. And you don’t have to be afraid to try new things.”

Now, MissDarcei is thinking about what happens when she gets to build the products herself.

She told me she hopes to start her own beauty brand, something she is already working toward and hopes to bring to fruition within the next few years. The idea would bring her journey almost full circle: taking what first drew her to K-beauty and building the inclusivity she once had to improvise for herself.

“Basically taking everything that I love about K-beauty and making it inclusive for everybody. Because that was my dream back then, it was like, ‘Oh, I wish that I could try this thing. I wish that I could use this thing. I wish that this looked good on me.’ And I had to do a bunch of experimentation on my own in my own room to try and figure out how to get this look to look good on me. And I don’t want people to have to struggle through that as I did. I want to create a brand that everybody looks good in, where everyone can find their shade, where everyone looks good in this lipstick.”

It is difficult not to see that ambition as the natural conclusion to everything that came before it.

A teenager begins making videos because beauty seems fun. A young Black woman tries looks she once assumed were not for her. An audience begins trying along with her. A viral video reaches a brand. A brand responds. Another invites her into the lab. Ten new shades emerge from the process.

And somewhere along the way, Black Girl Tries stops sounding simply like the name of a video series.

It starts sounding like a philosophy.

Try the lipstick. Try the trend. Try the foundation that was not marketed to you. Try the thing you were taught belonged to somebody else. And if it does not work, perhaps the answer is not that you were wrong for wanting it.

Perhaps someone simply needs to make it better.