Hello friends, and welcome to another article, but Safiya Nygaard style. If you haven’t heard of the beauty blogger, then you might have seen Nygaard in older BuzzFeed videos or on YouTube Rewind 2018 in disguise as a mad scientist.
As someone who worked at BuzzFeed Video as a video producer from 2015 to 2017, Nygaard mainly focused on a series called “Ladylike,” where a group of five women try new “ladylike” things or products, among other antics. After two years of producing the show, Nygaard decided to leave BuzzFeed to focus on her own YouTube channel.
Now, her videos consist of her wearing outrageous outfits with pieces of clothing like platform Crocs, thigh-high Uggs and clear plastic jeans for the sake of *fashion* or videos of her testing outfits or tech accessories for a week. Within the two years of departing BuzzFeed, Nygaard’s channel now has over 7 million subscribers and 800 million views.
In the YouTube Rewind video, Nygaard is shown diabolically brewing a pink pot of melting liquid, which, while weird, gives a pretty good indication of what makes her feed so captivating. She is the creator of what she calls “Bad Makeup Science,” a series of videos where she takes a basic makeup product, such as lipstick or highlighter, scrapes pieces off it and mixes them with shavings from other products to create a new cosmetic. A recurring name that has popped up in her “BMS” vids is Frankenstein, because of the choppy dissections to her makeup.
Her first Franken-creation came after she melted all of her own nude lipsticks together. Inspired by fellow YouTuber Simply Nailogical, who combined all of her holographic nail polishes into one, Nygaard took it upon herself to do something similar. Because she didn’t have an abundance of nail polish though, she used nude bullet lipsticks, which, as an admitted lipstick hoarder, were easier to come by.
The first step in her process was to slice off a teeny bit of lipstick from each of her bullets and compile it in a small glass bowl. After cutting about 30 lipsticks, she scraped the contents of the small bowl into a tiny heated pan, which melted into a bubbling brownish liquid. Once she poured her concoction into a small bullet mold and let it set, her first Franken family member was born.
The second member of her Franken family was introduced about a month after the nude lipsticks; this time, Nygaard decided to mix all of her foundations together. She doesn’t credit anyone in the video for this idea, so it’s safe to assume that Nygaard started the trend of foundation-mixing in the beauty community.
In the video, she points out that, unlike lipstick, which is more about someone’s taste and what they like, foundation is generally supposed to match skin tone, which can lead to a host of complications. By mixing all of her foundations, Nygaard hoped to find what could be considered her “perfect” match.
Much like her first “Bad Makeup Science” video, Nygaard slowly added one pump of each of her foundations into one bottle. Testing the waters, she only did one pump of each foundation to see how much of her single bottle it fills up. After the first round, Nygaard repeated this process two more times to get a decent amount of foundation into one bottle.
After many pumps and squirts of all 15 of her foundations of varying textures, Nygaard mixed the beauty soup in her small bottle to the best of her ability. When she swatched and tested it, she vlogged her day, repeatedly giving updates after “X” amount of hours of wear. And after a full day of running errands outside in warm weather, spicy king pao chicken and a late night yoga sesh, her Franken-dation baby held over seven hours strong.
Skipping ahead a few months to April 2018, one of Nygaard’s more popular Franken family members was birthed when, after doing only makeup products in her collection, Nygaard wanted to go bigger. This time, Nygaard wanted to “Bad Makeup Science” every lipstick at Sephora.
To do so, she started by dropped some whopping dollars and purchasing every bullet lipstick she could get her hands on. With bags and bags of lipstick in tow, she traveled to a boba shop in LA to borrow a bigger kitchen. There, she and her boyfriend, Tyler, got to removing the bullets from their tubes and plopping them into a very deep pot. After three-and-a-half hours of butchering 603 bullets from 20 different brands, Nygaard and Tyler headed home to try to melt down their mountain of lipstick.
After the massive pot had sat on a hot plate for an hour, Nygaard noticed that only the bottom layer of lipstick had started to melt. So, to get everything melted together she started blowdrying the top of her pot. To really give the lipstick an extra push in the melting process, she took a blow torch to her stew of lip products.
Once she had all of the chili-like chunks melted and her stew more resembled a liquidy broth, she started to ladle out the product to pour as much as of it as she could into lipstick bullet molds. After her first batch of Franken-lipsticks had sat in the freezer for 10 minutes, she pulled them out and began packaging the newly formed lipstick into 500 tubes.
Because the experiment created so many tubes of lipsticks, Nygaard chose to do a giveaway for her subscribers. Whoever left a creative enough name that she and Tyler liked, Nygaard would send that subscriber their very own mega Franken Sephora lipstick.
The thing that probably made this Franken-baby so popular was the fact that it didn’t only cater to Nygaard’s skin tone how a nude lipstick, foundation or eyeshadow would. She tried her best to get as many tube lipsticks from Sephora as she could, including all of the nudes, reds, pinks, purples, oranges, blues, greens and every other miscellaneous lip tint there was.
If you would like to see this intriguing “Bad Makeup Science” brew, along with all of Nygaard’s other Franken family creations, head over to her playlist on her YouTube channel.
