Nearly three years after the world shut down, it’s hardly surprising to hear about someone who started a side hustle during the pandemic or about someone who got really into TikTok. But starting a side hustle, launching it on TikTok, going viral, and getting products on the shelves of a massive retail chain within those three years? That’s, put simply, incredible. And it’s exactly what Fiona Co Chan, founder of Youthforia — the first East Asian makeup brand sold at Ulta Beauty, as of this week — did.
When the pandemic first started, Chan was quarantined in Hong Kong and, like many of us at that time, feeling nostalgic about going out with her friends — and the beloved ritual of putting on makeup that so often comes with it. But Chan didn’t have the best track record with makeup. Before 2020, she worked in tech and traveled to several highly polluted cities throughout Asia. She realized her Western makeup products reacted poorly to heavy pollution, in turn damaging her sensitive skin. Back in quarantine, Chan remembered something her mom, a Vietnamese refugee, had taught her from a young age: that taking care of your body starts with what you put inside of it. That’s when she had an idea: What if she combined elements of Asian skin care products and the culture’s self-care ethos she knew so intimately with Western-style makeup?
