Bloggers are no strangers to coming up with innovative, bizarre beauty 'challenges' to entertain their masses of followers, and we've got no problem with that when they're silly and fun to watch like the charcoal face mask challenge but when it comes to stunts that are blatantly offensive? Not so much.
White beauty blogger Vika Shapel thought she was on the cusp of creating the next viral hit to rival the 100 layers of nail polish challenge when she got together with her pal to paint half their faces in dark brown paint, stick in some brown contact lenses, curl their hair into tight ringlets and name it 'the chocolate challenge'. Why she ever thought this was a good idea, we'll never know.
Uploading a photo to Instagram, she captioned it: "Something fun is coming to Youtube, idk if there is a challenge like this but we haven't seen it so I'm calling it the chocolate challenge! Come watch us transform into deep chocolate skin tones from our pasty pale."
Unsurprisingly, the post has caused mass online outrage with people rushing to Twitter to voice their offence and drag the blogger's attempt to mimic a darker skin tone, pointing out its blatant 'blackface'.
After the backlash and being getting reported a whole bunch of times by outraged Internet users, Vika quickly deleted her Instagram and Twitter accounts, and removed all her videos from her YouTube channel, but of course the offending post had already be seen by thousands because this is 2017 and screenshots are the holy grail of life savers.
She has since apologised for the misjudged post. Speaking to Yahoo beauty, the blogger said: '‘I would like to apologize to people that were hurt or offended by my post, and it won’t happen again. I simply wanted to see how I looked in a deeper skin tone, I wasn’t aware of the whole black-face concept before people began commenting it on the photo."
I think we can all agree this is a lesson to bloggers to be a bit more mindful with their content - we all love to be entertained, but sometimes a bit of common sense is all it takes to make sure it can be enjoyed by everyone.
Are you outraged by this challenge too? Let us know your thoughts @soFeminineUK
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