Natasha Caudill Is Educating TikTok on Colorblindness One Makeup Swatch at a Time

This is a recurring theme throughout Caudill’s videos. While she’s able to use apps such as ColorAssist and ColorBlindPal to scan the color of items she points her phone at, it can be far more difficult to surmise the color of smaller items — namely, makeup, especially with non-descriptive names such as “Diana” or numbers. Although she can follow tutorials other people have created with the non-accessible palettes she owns, she shouldn’t have to do that at all.

“Brands love to use fun, quirky names for their makeup products, but I would love regular color-identifying names. It always helps me out so much when a brand does include them,” she explains of how beauty brands can become more accessible. “When I know that the mascara I’m using is black and not purple, I feel a lot more confident.”

You think she’s joking, but Caudill once wore purple mascara for months before someone told her it wasn’t black. And she’s constantly worried she’ll have a major makeup faux pas.

“Blushes, highlighters, and even eye shadows are typically not very colorblind-friendly because brands oftentimes won’t label them with actual color names,” she explains. “I’m always just a little bit scared I’m going to put on a crazy neon highlighter or eye shadow by accident.” Blush is notoriously challenging for Caudill because she can’t always tell how much she’s putting on. “My trick is to dip my brush really lightly into my blush and blend as much as I can so that I hopefully don’t leave the house looking like a clown.”

While many brands are not accessible to people with colorblindness, Caudill says products such as mascara and brow pencils are almost always labeled with regular color names. She lauds Colourpop Cosmetics, in particular, for including descriptions of the colors in its palettes on its website — something more brands should do to be more accessible.

As open as Caudill is with her followers, the cost of sharing little pieces of her life online is that trolls and haters sometimes come out of the woodwork to comment on her videos. Caudill said she’d be rich if she had a dollar for every time someone asked her what her favorite color was or if she could tell them what color shirt they were wearing. She even went as far once as to use Google Translate to dispel the myth that men are the only people who experience colorblindness.