Sharon Chuter and the Seventy-Two-Hour Question

Sharon Chuter was born in Nigeria and worked for PepsiCo, Benefit Cosmetics and L'Oréal before founding her own brand. UOMA Beauty launched in the United Kingdom in 2019 with a foundation in fifty-one shades, and went on to be stocked by retailers including Ulta Beauty, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, Harvey Nichols, Shoppers Drug Mart and QVC.^[1]

Her lasting contribution to the industry was not a product. It was a question, asked in public, with a deadline.

On 3 June 2020, as companies across the industry posted statements of solidarity with Black Lives Matter, Chuter started a campaign on Instagram under the hashtag #PullUpOrShutUp. She asked brands to publish within seventy-two hours the number of Black employees they had at corporate level and in leadership.^[2] It began in the days after the killing of George Floyd.^[3]

She began with her own company. UOMA Beauty's staff, she disclosed, was fifty-eight per cent Black and seventy-five per cent female.^[2]

Companies answered. Among those that published figures were Ulta Beauty, Sephora, L'Oréal USA, Glossier and Revlon, and celebrity-owned brands including Kylie Cosmetics and Honest Beauty.^[4] One account puts the number of brands that responded publicly within the first seventy-two hours at nearly eighty.^[5]

That was the design. A statement of support costs nothing; a headcount is a fact that can be compared next year.

The campaign also moved the industry's argument about race from the product to the payroll. For decades the question had been who the shades were made for. Chuter asked who was employed to make and sell them, and she asked it in a form that could not be answered with a new shade.

The campaign became an organisation, Pull Up For Change. Its Make It Black campaign set out to challenge the negative connotations of the word black, persuading brands including Briogeo, Maybelline and ColourPop to reissue popular products in black packaging, with the proceeds going to the organisation's fund for small businesses. By February 2023 that fund had raised nearly a million dollars and supported almost ten Black-owned founders.^[6]

Chuter stepped down as UOMA's chief executive in May 2023, and the company, which had run into financial difficulty, was acquired that December. She died at her home in Los Angeles on 14 August 2025. She was thirty-eight.^[7]

What the disclosures changed. Publishing a number is not the same as changing it, and the sources cited here record who answered in June 2020, not what their figures were a year, or five years, later.^[8] Nor do they record how many of the companies that were asked chose to say nothing.