Naturium Niacinamide Serum
A skincare brand a YouTube beauty reviewer secretly owned while recommending it — an FTC investigation followed, and she still sold the company for $355 million four years later.
Naturium is an ingredient-forward, affordably-priced skincare line — this niacinamide serum is one of its core actives-based products, sitting in the $12-$25 range the brand built its whole identity around. Its backstory is one of the more genuinely dramatic founder stories in mass beauty: real controversy, a federal investigation, and a happy ending that's unusual even by startup standards.
A YouTuber's undisclosed brand, and the backlash that followed
Susan Yara built a following of hundreds of thousands on her Mixed Makeup YouTube channel as a trusted, seemingly independent skincare reviewer. In 2020, it came out that one of the brands she'd been recommending — Naturium — was actually her own, undisclosed at the time. The backlash was immediate, and it triggered a roughly two-year Federal Trade Commission investigation into undisclosed brand ownership, which can violate FTC endorsement rules.
Yara was ultimately cleared, and rather than retreating, kept building the brand straight through the controversy — a genuinely uncommon outcome for a creator caught in this kind of undisclosed-ownership scandal.
From controversy to a $355 million exit in under 4 years
Naturium landed distribution at Target, which gave it real retail scale and helped attract private equity investment (Prelude Growth Partners took a minority stake in 2021). By 2023, the brand was nearing $90 million in annual net sales — and e.l.f. Beauty acquired it for $355 million that August, in a deal expected to roughly double e.l.f.'s entire skincare business.
This is now the second e.l.f. Beauty acquisition on this site (alongside Rhode) — the company is increasingly building a portfolio of fast-growing, differently-positioned beauty brands rather than growing everything under one label.
