Beauty influencer Avonna Sunshine has nearly half a million followers, so when she took to TikTok to criticize celebrity beauty brand Patrick Ta for not compensating her, people stopped and listened.
Ta and company co-owners Rima and Avo Minaysan have built a beauty empire on inclusivity, prioritizing shade range and profiting “off of the Black dollar,” as Sunshine pointed out in her frustrated rant.
“This isn’t just about one brand, it’s about the need for fairness, accountability, and equity across the industry,” she said as she destroyed several of Ta’s famous Double-Take “Blush Duos” before dumping them in the trash.
@avonnasunshine Any guesses on who it might be?
When her video went viral, Ta was quick to respond with a tearful apology on TikTok, but another Black beauty influencer, Tiffani Davis, noticed something “odd” about it. Ta had recorded different takes, one with a shaky voice and seemingly on the verge of crying (though no tears were spotted) and another version with a straight face. Davis criticized the celeb markup artist for deleting his first video and replacing it with the one showing him fake crying.
“Um…” she said with a laugh. “I get having a script, I get wanting to have your thoughts organized, but the post and delete is a little weird because it’s going back to the take where you’re crying,” she noted in her video.
@tiffanicvd PATRICK TA APOLOGIZES 🤔🤔🤔 vc: @Court 💕 #makeup #makeupartist #patrickta #makeupbrand #greenscreenvideo ♬ original sound – tiffani 🧚🏾 | 4c natural hair
In damage control mode, Ta included a caption on his “crying” TikTok apology, insisting it was the “original take.”
“This is not a situation I took lightly. I recorded multiple rounds of this response and wanted to share what felt most authentic to me,” he wrote. “This was my original take. More importantly, this is about righting my wrong.” In the apology, Ta speaks directly to Sunshine, saying, “I want to get you compensated as soon as possible, today if you are willing to answer me,” adding that he wasn’t aware of the mistake made by his finance team.
Sunshine, who struck a deal with the company in spring, is just the latest influencer in a long string of Black content creators who have called out brands for not compensating them. A 2023 study showed that Black influencers make significantly less money than their white counterparts, despite the fact that Black beauty consumers spend $9.4 billion annually, according to Nielsen IQ.
“I have a question for brands. How would you feel if someone stole from you? If someone took your hard-earned time and blood, sweat, and tears, and they stole from you?” Sunshine asked her viewers.
“You see people, especially Black people, riding for the company, and that doesn’t make me feel very well. I just wonder, if those Black creators that are supporting you so heavily knew that you were out here not paying Black creators, how would they feel? I don’t think they’d be okay with that. I’m surely not.”
After the controversy exploded, the Dallas-based influencer debated if she should jump back into the fray but decided to make a follow-up video boosting the brands that pay her. The comments of support have been flooding in.
“PERIOD!! Pay black creators for their content. It’s that content that boost product sales amongst their communities. There are products that are promoted by black creators that literally sell out because of their influence. They DESERVE the compensation!” commented a Reddit user, while another quipped “Code for ‘I saw your pathetic apology video you taped multiple times Patrick, and you can choke on it…PAY ME in dollars not words!’”
Another posted, “It’s unreal to me that this is even a debate. This is work, and it is time and energy consuming. Black creators deserve to be paid for their work.”
Comedian and actress Jessie Woo also voiced her opinion on the Patrick Ta controversy on her podcast Jess A Couple Things.
“While they don’t always want to make you the face, they know the power that Black women have when it comes to putting a brand out there, they know, and that is why you got Patrick Ta with his balloon lips and his white women tears on Tiktok crying and carrying on for his third take of his apology, because he knows he fucked up.”
