The ethics of influencer accountability

Makeup artist and beauty product founder Patrick Ta recently sat down with Emma Grede on her podcast, Aspire with Emma, to address the controversy that’s been surrounding him and his brand for the last several weeks. In an episode called The Accountability Conversation, Patrick reflected on the situation that’s been brewing, which really started to intensify after the launch of two new products - the Liquid Transition Brightening Blush and the Major Headlines Transition Blurring Under Eye Blush Duo. Quite a mouthful, huh?

Okay, so, beauty product founder launches two new blush products – what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is the source of inspiration for the very products he went on to not only launch, but trademark. There’s a makeup artist named Ngozi Esther Edeme, who goes by the moniker PaintedByEsther, and she was undoubtedly the person who made this kind of very specific blush application and aesthetic popular. And I should add that she popularized it on Black women, specifically. Think Summer House’s Ciara Miller, singers Tyla, Kelly Rowland, Chloe Bailey, and perhaps most famously, Love Island’s breakout star, Olandria Carthen.

You’d have to live under a rock to not have seen photos of the stunning Olandria with bright pink, eye-high blush – a look that until recently, hasn’t been very popular among Black women in Hollywood, who, throughout history, have typically been seen with deeper shades and a very prescriptive makeup look. This was largely in part to a long history of not having makeup artists skilled in applying makeup to darker skin tones, in addition to exclusive beauty products that really only catered to lighter skin tones in the first place.

Luckily, the tides have changed. Many people cite the 2017 launch of Rihanna’s makeup and beauty line, Fenty Beauty, as a major pivot to more inclusive makeup, with over 50 shades of foundation that many agree ventured into previously unchartered territory. Rihanna’s foray into beauty inspired subsequent makeup launches from celebrities like Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande and Gwen Stefani.

With the shifts in the makeup industry between 2017 and now, perhaps it wasn’t so far-fetched when a Black woman was finally credited with one of last year’s biggest makeup trends. In an article, ELLE identified so called “Barbie blush” as being the “emerging trend to watch” as 2025 came to a close. This followed two full years of Barbie and pink hype, in general, which can be attributed to the 2023 box office smash hit starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. But the long-lasting fascination with the reimagination of pink hues and blush is in fact, according to ELLE’s citing of Google Trend information, directly correlated to Esther. Her signature, if you will.

Back in 2025, Esther told ELLE that the ‘clean girl’ makeup aesthetic has not always been inclusive to Black women.

“I wanted to challenge that by using this style of glam on Black women, who have always been told to wear purples or reds,” she said.

She went on to explain that she uses both cream and powder formulas, citing things like the efficacy of cream for dry skin and powder for oily skin, giving her more control of the shine. Finally, she told the outlet she prefers fellow Black beauty expert, Danessa Myricks, for her cream products.

This here is a prime example of how easy it is to extend credit where its due. All Esther did was drop the name of the person whose product she most preferred in her makeup process, and it now lives on in that ELLE article, which the cadence of impact could be anything from further exposure or financial profit for Danessa. And with the ease in which Esther did this, it begs the question of why, despite increasing pressure from social media users, did Patrick Ta initially fail to mention the obvious inspiration behind his new makeup application content, videos, and ultimately, his trademarked products? And why did he refuse to acknowledge Esther’s influence until now?

During the podcast, he offered a rinse and repeat of what we’ve heard in situations similar to this. And in a statement to social media, we see some of the popular buzz words: accountability, impact, different lens, not my intention. Blah. Blah. Blah. And as a result of his hollow and seemingly insincere apology, people on social media are having a field day and taking him to task over what they allege his true intentions were.

“I wanted to make less pigmented blush for a higher price to gouge an audience of mostly young impressionable women and ripping off the work of POC creators in the process,” one Reddit user said in a thread where people shared their thoughts about the hoopla.

“’More accessible’ was making an expensive product that had to be bought with multiple other products from your line? Miss me with that bullshit, Pat,” another user pointed out.

What that second user points out is a key observation. It is a technique that he’s adopted and marketed as his own, rather than a product. This is, in part, what left Esther so incredibly vulnerable to what this Forbes article rightfully described as ‘career erasure’. The article goes on to explain why Black people are especially susceptible to this.

Trademark attorney Ticora Davis highlights the massive role Black people play in creating and promoting popular culture. And we see this in the influence we have by way of having a heavy influence on music, trends and fashion. But when it comes to a case like this, things get sticky.

“Generally, trademark rights go to whoever first used a phrase in commerce to identify the brand,” Ticora said. “It doesn’t always go to the person who coined a catchphrase. We’ve seen this so often with Lil’ Wayne when he said ‘bling bling’ in a rap but he never trademarked and he never tied it to a product or service…or the young lady who said ‘on fleek’ but she never attached that phrase to a product or service. That happens a lot, particularly to those in the African diaspora, where we are shaping the cultural lexicon but we’re not always the producers behind products or services attached to words or phrases.”

I mentioned that it was the fact that Esther was utilizing and popularizing a technique, rather than a product, that was partially behind her vulnerability to career erasure. But the other part that left her open to someone else coming in and stealing her thunder was the lack of ethical conduct at play here – and often at play in situations involving marginalized people. And perhaps that’s what’s so incredibly disappointing about all of this, too. Patrick is Vietnamese-American. He knows what it’s like to be on the margins of society, especially in the beauty industry.

But even within that dynamic, he still stands in a place of having more privilege than Esther, and we saw him try to wield that power to his advantage. Patrick knew that between this aesthetic being a massive trend, his products already amassing so much success and the size of his following just about swallowing Esther’s whole multiple times over, a trademark would be the last thing needed to really solidify and advance his place in the beauty landscape. But I just don’t think he accounted for the backlash, which jeopardizes just about everything he had to gain from this move in the first place. Plus, this whole debacle has truly elevated Esther’s visibility.

The conversation surrounding a technique versus a product is a pretty good metaphor for the situation at hand here. And for the impact Black people have on just about everything we do – the magic we bring and the life we inject into it all. You can create all the products you want to emulate what we do, and you can even trademark them if you wish. But you can never, ever imitate or emulate how we do it.

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