What We Can Learn from Susan Yara’s Skincare Scandal

From an excited announcement to a tearful apology.

If you’re like me, then before this week you had no idea who Susan Yara is or what she does for a living. Well, to quickly break it down the 38-year old mother of two:

• Runs a Youtube channel called MixedMakeup with over 1 million subscribers.
• Has another channel called FAM: For All Moms with 44k subscribers and a personal channel called Susan Yara with over 250k subscribers.
• Recently announced her own skincare line.

Sounds like everything’s looking up for her, right?

Wrong.

Pulling off the Veil

Much of Susan Yara’s MixedMakeup channel focused on skincare and beauty. She reacted to other YouTubers’ skincare routines and provided skincare advice and product recommendations. With skincare playing such a big part in her life and her main channel, it’s not really a surprise that she launched her own skincare line.

But many of her fans were not happy with the reveal of her skincare line, Naturium. For months, Susan had been talking about Naturium as if it was a random brand she had just discovered. She raved about the price point and even bashed a competitor, skincare brand “The Ordinary” by saying Naturium had a better texture and better ingredients. At no point up until her reveal video on June 21st did she mention she was affiliated with the brand in any way.

So What’s the Big Deal?

Since Susan began her MixedMakeup channel in 2014, she has been steadily gaining a fanbase and building their trust. Trust is one of the biggest assets a company can have with their customers.

Why?

Without your customers, your business would not exist nor would it flourish. Happy customers are also considered to be the best marketing strategy because they lead to word-of-mouth promotion and online reviews. Those happy customers build up the credibility and trustworthiness of your brand, increasing your visibility to others (including outsiders yet to become customers).

If the trust between the customer and the company is broken, unhappy customers will share their feelings to other potential customers. Your former (and potential) fans will then turn to your competitors and may even blacklist your company.

Yara tried to explain that she kept her involvement with Naturium a secret because she didn’t want biased reviews. However, what she created was a lot of broken trust between her and her fans. By continuously promoting the brand while claiming that she had no involvement, many felt scammed.

How could they trust her reviews now? How could they trust her new skincare line? What if all of her positive reviews on the Naturium products were just because she owned the brand?

Apology Not Accepted

On June 25th, Susan posted an apology video to her MixedMakeup channel. In this video, she explained that she didn’t actually sign the contract to be involved in Naturium until two weeks ago.

It was my mistake to talk about NATURIUM without disclosing my relationship with the brand. I did not make a disclosure, because I was uncertain of what to disclose. At this time, we were in such an in-between place on my role. Simply, nothing had been finalized with NATURIUM. — Susan Yara

Despite the apology, fans were still not happy. They pointed out that not only does this situation cause an issue with her reputation, it’s also potentially a legal issue. This is because the FTC guideline for influencers states that the influencer must disclose any existing relationship with the brand while they choose to endorse it.

Instead of taking one step forward with her apology, Susan took two steps back. Customers were looking for a more sincere apology from someone they felt understood their mistake and wanted to be better.

Unfortunately for Susan, the damage has been done. As the old saying goes: it takes years to build trust and only seconds to destroy it.