Sharon Chuter, the founder and former creative director of beauty brand Uoma Beauty, has died at the age of 38. Chuter was found dead on a patio on August 14, according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner. Her death is still under investigation as of the time of putting together this story.
Chuter founded her cosmetics company to champion inclusivity and diversity. With over 50 shades of foundation, Uoma Beauty was launched to cater to the people left untouched by many of the world’s top cosmetic brands.
Before starting Uoma Beauty in 2018, she could not get any skincare products suitable for her skin. Her quest to navigate the lack of diversity in the beauty industry led her to found Uoma Beauty. People refer to her brand as an “ethnic brand” or “multicultural beauty” due to its inclusivity.
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“I’m like, there should be no multicultural beauty, the world is multicultural. There should be beauty,” she said in an interview. “We shouldn’t be labeling people who are doing the right thing and creating a category for them.”
Before establishing her company, Chuter asked Revlon if she could be their distributor in her country, Nigeria. She was then 19 years old. This was after she observed that Nigeria did not have any mainstream beauty brands officially in the country.
“I reached out to every brand imaginable asking if I could bring them to Nigeria and Revlon responded,” Chuter was quoted by Sportify It. “They [Revlon] had no idea I was a kid. I ended up doing the impossible because they had been trying to come to Nigeria for over a decade. That’s how I brought Revlon in, but also started my beauty career. I realized I couldn’t really manage it so I got the exclusive rights and I sold it to a proper distributor who could do the job. It made me realize what I want to do.”
Decades after bringing Revlon to Nigeria, she guided her own company to remarkable success, beating out some of the world’s most prominent brands and winning several awards.
However, in 2023, she stepped down as CEO of Uoma Beauty. She announced on Instagram that she had faced a health scare and would like to pursue a healthier work-life balance.
Two years later, in February 2025, she filed a lawsuit against Uoma Beauty’s new owner, MacArthur Beauty, BrainTrust (a venture fund that made Uoma Beauty one of its first investments), and Settle Funding, People reported.
Among the allegations, the lawsuit claimed that “BrainTrust took control of Uoma’s operations and ultimately pushed Ms. Chuter out of her operational roles,” and that BrainTrust “ceased Uoma Beauty’s operations during Chuter’s medical leave, which, according to her, was meant to end in July 2023,” the outlet added.
Besides her beauty brand, the Nigerian-born founder launched the #PullUpOrShutUp campaign in 2020 amid global calls for racial justice. The campaign challenged beauty brands to publicly disclose the percentage of Black employees in their corporate and leadership ranks.
The following year, Chuter launched the Make It BLACK campaign which called upon “all major dictionaries” to “add the current elevated and positive use of the word black” while taking out “dangerous definition.”
