YouTube Beauty Challenges That Ended In Serious Injuries

These days, it feels like young people are capable of doing anything. That is, in part, because they have more knowledge easily at their disposal than any generation before them. 

YouTube has been a major factor in that shift and to that end, it has some serious influencing power. Crafts that were all but written off as pastimes of yore, such as crocheting and needlepoint, have found new life in the YouTube generation. For as much greatness as can come out of kids exploring the world of DIY and online learning, there can also be some big downsides. After all, these viewers are easily influenceable kids who sometimes listen before they think.

That's where YouTube challenges can pose some serious danger. It's unclear how some of these challenges pop up but once a popular YouTuber tries it out, they're bound to go viral. Some are fun and harmless but there are quite a few, especially in the beauty sphere, that have led to some alarming injuries and lessons about not believing everything you see online.

Once upon a time, people were ridiculed for having freckles. Those days have come and gone. Freckles can give you a fresh-faced, youthful look that naturally appeals to a lot of YouTube beauty aficionados. The problem, of course, is that not everyone naturally has freckles.

Enter beauty YouTube solutions, which range from achieving the freckled look by spraying hair dye on your face or even using henna to recreate the look (per Diply). Naomi Jon was one of the YouTubers who tried to give herself faux, permanent freckles with henna, only to quickly realize the error of her ways when her skin started having a reaction, per Bustle. Jon did not test the henna on her skin first to see if there were any issues, so she had no one to blame when her entire face turned beet red. Later on, she also discovered that just about everything that could remove the henna from her face was also bad for her skin.

Sadly, she was far from the only one. Both beauty and health experts have advised against DIY-ing this particular trend.

Kylie Jenner's lip fillers were once the biggest scandal of her life. While Jenner has toned down the lips in the years since first experimenting with fillers, some of her fans received some long-lasting damage from trying to achieve her look with YouTube's "Kylie Jenner lip challenge." 

It's unclear where exactly the trend got started, but it encouraged young people looking for the perfect lips to put a shot glass over their mouth and suck, per Business Insider. PopSugar noted that after placing the shot glass over your mouth, you were supposed to suck in the air. The pressure would help to create the full lip look, but sometimes, the glass would break under the pressure. This would lead to some serious injuries and permanent damage. 

However, broken glass-related injuries were far from the only ones to result from this challenge. Photos of young women with bruised, swollen lips began cropping up all over the internet. It got to the point that Jenner herself made sure to speak out against the challenge. "I'm not here to try & encourage people/young girls to look like me or to think this is the way they should look," Jenner tweeted at the time (via Twitter). "I want to encourage people/young girls like me to be YOURSELF & not be afraid to experiment w your look. ❤️❤️❤️"

Some beauty influencers recently decided to experiment with the idea that you can achieve the effects of contouring longer-term if you get a very specific tan. The process involves "combining two different levels of sunscreen can help create the illusion of a contoured face and toned abs," according to the New York Post.

What YouTubers who have attempted the challenge haven't taken into account is sun damage. On its face, a challenge that promotes the use of sunscreen seems like a good thing. However, it's still encouraging you to obtain sun damage on areas of your face, which no perfect contour is worth.

"This is absolutely not a safe treatment," Dermatologist Joshua Zeichner told Refinery29 of the trend. "We know that direct UV light exposure is the single greatest risk factor for the development of both premature aging as well as skin cancers."