Challenges have been a popular among beauty bloggers on social media—from unusual items used as applicators to full faces entirely done with food products, these experiments are construed as silly and lighthearted until one Oregon vlogger decided that transforming herself and her friend into Black people fit among them.
Vika Shapel called it, “The Chocolate Challenge,” for her, the gag was putting darker foundation from her forehead down to her chest and wearing brown contacts. She and her friend kept half of their faces untouched to contrast their whiteness with their artificial brownness. The vlogger posted the results to Instagram to tease a future video upload. “Something fun is coming to YouTube,” Shapel wrote. “Come watch us transform into deep chocolate skin tones from our pasty pale.”
As you can imagine, the Internet shut that down quick! People took to Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to denounce her challenge and call out its racially offensive manner, comparing it to blackface.
Historically, minstrels—and children’s toys of similar accord—painted their faces black to poke fun as those with darker skin and utilized stereotypes that criminalized them and belittled their intelligence. This is not just a US occurrence. Blackface was a form of entertainment in many countries, and Shapel calling her act “fun” did not help her case among the public. Due to such negative responses, the contents of her social media presence are no more. Instagram and Twitter accounts have been deleted. No videos appear for public viewing on YouTube.
After all the viral notoriety, Shapel spoke with Yahoo Beauty about how her challenge did not go as planned. “I simply wanted to see how I looked in a deeper skin tone,” said the vlogger. “I wasn’t aware of the whole black-face 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 is hardly the first in Internet beauty to be associated with blackface or to deny knowledge of its history once accused. Makeup artists and gurus in the past have excused their actions with phrases like admiration for black beauty, total transformation, art, testing their capabilities as an artist and “I’m not racist.” These may not be as blunt as documenting oneself in a charcoal mask and a caption referencing the KKK, “thugs” or things of the sort—also a disturbing social media craze, but the ability to blend does not diminish the fact that they too wanted to appear Black for enjoyment purposes, as if blackness comes with an on-and-off switch.
Shapel’s original post no longer exists. But thanks to the invention of screenshots, you can take a look at the “Chocolate Challenge” below.
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