We spend most of our waking hours trying to care for ourselves, but there’s only so much time in the day. That’s what the makeup brand Youthforia is for — a line of high-quality beauty products that fit seamlessly into your routine.
Founder Fiona Co Chan accomplished this goal for Youthforia, making it the first East Asian makeup brand to be sold at Ulta Beauty.
While quarantined in Hong Kong, Fiona realized she should launch a cosmetics line. She also recalled a lesson her Vietnamese refugee mother had taught her early on about the importance of paying attention to what goes into one’s body. Although she didn’t have the best track record with makeup, she was able to consider her interest.
Before 2020, she worked in technology and visited several highly polluted Asian cities. She realized that her Western cosmetics reacted poorly to heavy pollution, resulting in skin damage.
This led Chan to work on a gentle formulation and test it out for two months before releasing it to the public on TikTok in 2021. She used the video hosting giant to see if people would be interested in trying out her new makeup creations, such as a liquid blush that adjusts to the skin’s pH. The BYO Blush was a huge success, and Chan’s Youthforia’s TikTok accumulated 40 or 50 million views in its first year.
While the launch of Youthforia on TikTok is undoubtedly cutting-edge, the brand’s core values are founded in the past. This comes directly from Chan’s identity and her upbringing in an Asian San Francisco household where her mother stressed the importance of viewing the body as a whole.
