Make-up you can sleep in: clean beauty brand Youthforia’s founder on her big idea, taking TikTok by storm, and products in the pipeline

Fiona Co Chan launched Youthforia in 2021, selling make-up that can be left on without causing irritation; soon videos of its line-up went viral on social media

With its products now sold by beauty outlets and retailers such as Amazon, Chan aims to expand to foundation and eye make-up to have a ‘whole face’ offering

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Published: 7:15pm, 31 Jan 2023

Although Youthforia has made its name producing make-up so clean that you can leave it on overnight, founder Fiona Co Chan doesn’t encourage making this a regular habit.

“Life happens, and we sometimes end up falling asleep with our make-up on,” she says. “The idea behind the brand was to offer products that acted as skincare.”

Chan founded the brand on this simple premise in April 2021, and it has since become a viral sensation, with videos featuring its products receiving up to 50 million views on TikTok. Now, just 18 months after launching, Youthforia has more than 2 million likes on the social media platform and is stocked by major retailers.

Chan grew up in San Francisco, in the United States, and graduated from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire – one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Before entering the beauty industry, she worked in a very different field, selling complex software for data centres.

Chan’s Youthforia make-up brand has become a viral sensation on TikTok.

That job necessitated frequent travel to Hong Kong, which is where she met her now-husband. It was while waiting for pandemic-related restrictions to lift that Chan began thinking about make-up that could double as skincare, based on her own youthful experiences.