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She's So Lucky

The Power of Play: How Letting Yourself Experiment Changes Everything with Darcei Giles

She's So Lucky

She's So Lucky

Health & Fitness, Entrepreneurship, Business, Education, Self-improvement, #Shessolucky, Balancedblackgirl, Lesalfred, Balancedles

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

#321: If you've ever felt like you had to choose between the beauty trends you love and the ones that were "meant for you," this conversation will feel like permission to explore it all. Today I'm sitting down with Darcei Giles — the award-winning content creator who's been pioneering inclusivity in beauty since before it was an industry buzzword.

Darcei shares her journey from making webcam videos in 2010 to becoming a bridge between Korean beauty innovation and Black beauty consumers. She opens up about the viral series that changed everything, the moment a brand actually listened to her feedback, and why she's spent over a decade refusing to delete her early content.

This episode is for you if:

  • You're navigating spaces where you don't see yourself reflected
  • You're curious about what real brand inclusivity looks like behind the scenes
  • You want to understand how to build longevity in a constantly changing industry


We talk about…

  • How a lighthearted video concept became a movement that gave thousands of Black women permission to experiment
  • The real reason Korean beauty brands are getting inclusivity right (and what American brands can learn)
  • Why Darcei made three TikToks a day for 90 days straight — and gained 100K followers
  • What happened when she told a foundation brand "call me" and they actually did
  • The difference between creating 30 shades and creating 30 good shades
  • Going into the lab to create foundation shades that had never existed before
  • Why she keeps her earliest videos up despite the cringe factor
  • What it takes to stay relevant for 15 years without losing yourself
  • Her plans to merge Korean skincare innovation with Black beauty needs in her own future brand


Episode Links:


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  • Google Shopping: #sponsored Shop the 100 products that made our year by visiting g.co/shop/holiday100


Connect with Les:


Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.


Produced by Dear Media.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The following podcast is a dear media production.

0:12.0

Welcome back to She's So Lucky.

0:13.6

My name is Les.

0:14.4

I'm your host and I appreciate you tuning in.

0:16.7

And this show is all about the different ways that we create our own luck. I'm really excited to welcome

0:23.2

today's guest to the show. She's an award-winning content creator who has really been a pioneer

0:28.7

in inclusivity in the beauty space. So please join me and welcoming Darcy Giles to the show. Welcome.

0:36.3

Hey. I'm so happy to have you. Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, well, I'm sure you got a jam-packed week. We're recording this during fashion week. You're here visiting New York. There's a lot going on. Yeah, so this is actually a really nice break. Okay, good. Good. Is this your first fashion week or have you done it before? No, it's my first fashion week ever. So how is it? It's great,

0:57.2

but like my feet are killing me. Yeah. Long days and cute shoes. We'll do it.

1:03.6

So I would love to start off by talking a bit more about your journey and interest in beauty. You've been a creator in the beauty space

1:11.6

for a while, but what initially planted that seed of your interest in beauty? Yeah, so I actually,

1:17.8

I started my YouTube channel in 2010. And back then, no one was really making money off of it.

1:24.7

It was just kind of like a fun hobby that people did and make YouTube

1:28.2

videos. And back then, I was a teenager, so I was watching a lot of other teen girls making

1:34.9

content. They would do like drugstore halls and like cute little makeup tutorials, like

1:41.5

definitely not a full beat or anything like that. I was watching them

1:45.1

and I was like, wow, that looks really fun. And so I decided to start my own beauty channel.

1:50.9

The first video I did was like my curly hair routine or something. It's still up on my channel

1:56.7

right now. You can watch it. And it's really cringy. And I think, I think, I'm talking like this or something, like in this, like, cute little voice. I know that a lot of people, like, they, they like to delete their old, like, cringy videos. They're like, I don't want to look at that anymore. But I feel like it's part of my journey. So I'm not like, I'm just going to keep it up. I feel like even things that I did like two years ago,

2:18.3

I'm like, ew, but it's still part of how I got here. Oh yeah. I feel the same way about podcasting and

2:23.8

even the old episodes where people are like, I'm going to start from the beginning. I'm like, cool.

2:29.0

If you want to hear that horrible mic quality and me saying um every other word and not really knowing what to do that's great because it also makes the things we do now sound and look so much better yes yeah so going back to when you first started creating content what was it about that that you really enjoyed was it it the creativity? Was it about the community that was

...

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