“If you want to take your blush from beautiful to brightened-blurred-baddie, this is my brand new Transition Blush,” says Patrick Ta in a tutorial accompanying his Transition Blush line. Posted on May 20, this is one of nine step-by-step tutorials where the celebrity make-up artist and founder demonstrates application techniques for the new product. On all nine videos, the comments are relentless. “Say her name,” reads one. Another has a sticker of Ta edited into a cartoon burglar, clutching blush palettes. One simply gets to the point: “ESTHERRRRRRRR.” 

Ngozi Esther Edeme is a viral make-up artist also known as Paintedbyesther; Ta was slammed in his comments section as users alleged he copied her blush application technique. What followed was a series of callout videos from Edeme, fans and other make-up artists accusing Ta of plagiarism and profiting from the work of a Black female artist. On Tuesday (June 16), Ta issued a public apology saying that while it wasn’t his intention “to claim ownership over a blush technique”, he takes accountability. 

The situation has raised a lot of questions and debate around ownership and copyright within an industry that has, in a lot of ways, been built through shared knowledge, and swapping and evolving techniques. Looks get adapted and referenced with such frequency that attempting to find the source is often all but moot. Artists frequently take inspiration from each other, something which has only been exacerbated by social media, defined similarly by remixes and recreations. 

Legally, can you claim ownership over a make-up technique? In short, no: it’s impossible. “You can’t trademark a technique,” says Antonella Colella, a US-based beauty lawyer who has been an attorney for almost 17 years. “A trademark relates to a good or a service. You cannot protect a methodology.” In the UK, laws around beauty IP function similarly to the US, terming beauty techniques “abstract methods” – a means to achieving certain aesthetic ends – and therefore unable to be protected. What you can copyright, which is what Ta did, is the name of a product and a phrase.

On 7 May 2025, Patrick Ta Beauty filed a trademark application for “Transition Blush”. Filing this application was a way for the company to protect a source identifier, ie your brand names, logos and product names. Basically, anything that tells a consumer what something is (not the way something is used or done). By copyrighting the phrase, Ta ensured that his brand would be the only one that could legally use the term “Transition Blush” on a product or in a campaign. It also meant that anyone who covered the trend – whether a writer, make-up artist or beauty influencer – would have to credit the brand or use different terms. 

“I always counsel that you should build a brand around the name so that everybody will know you from that name, and when they see that particular application, they immediately will think of you. If you connect it to a product, you connect it to something that you can get the trademark for,” says Colella. There’s a disconnect: the law seems to understand the transactional value of a beauty product and that it needs protection, but it doesn't recognise that the actual processes and techniques that use said products could be left entirely vulnerable. Still, culture would argue that aesthetic signatures already have their owners. And in a time when beauty fans are hyper-alert to provenance and credit, they can take the question of permission into their own hands, regardless of the law.

Neither Ta nor Edeme invented the technique at the centre of the debate. Transition blush – blush that seamlessly transitions from the under-eyes to the cheeks, delicately blended into a gradient of layered creams and powders – originates from Kevyn Aucoin’s 1997 book Making Faces (a fact acknowledged by all involved). In 2015, Aucoin’s brand launched a gradient blush named ‘Neo-Blush’. But it’s fair to say that Edeme popularised the ombré, gradient-blush look, particularly on darker skin tones, for the social media generation and it has become her signature technique (Dazed’s 2025 interview with Edeme centred heavily around blush and this technique).

In the digital era of beauty, creatives like Edeme are asked to build their careers on the foundation of their auteur-like signatures that audiences instantly recognise and associate with them. The irony is that while you can make something with a distinguishable style to stand out in an endless scroll of content, you can never own it (unless you have your own brand). “[This] is what we call an indexical mark,” says Camille Lawrence, founder of the Black Beauty Archive. Before becoming an archivist, Lawrence was a make-up artist, working with clients like Tierra Whack. She started the Black Beauty Archive partly as a tribute to her love for make-up artistry, partly as protection for the contributions of Black women in beauty. “We can see that technique on Chloe Bailey or on Olandria and think: that was Esther’s hand on that,” she says.

It’s not just make-up techniques that are unprotected in the world of beauty. The fragrance dupe market, which sells scents “inspired by” famous perfumes for a fraction of the cost, is the site of several cultural “thefts”. And while perfumers lament these duplicates – David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi, founder of cult brand Toskovat, called it upsetting and “beyond any doubt plagiarism; while Francis Kurkdjian said the industry has “few ethics” around IP – there’s very little that can be done. A brand can trademark logos, perfume names and even bottle shapes but the chemical formula is free for the taking. “When it comes to scent, you just can’t do that, because scent is subjective. Different people smell different things,” said Mireille Dagger, Broadfield law firm’s legal director, in The Guardian.  

So, if ownership is not an option, what do the creative minds in make-up have left? “Because beauty is ephemeral, in the past, how we’ve documented, and kind of stamped legitimacy on our techniques has been through educational videos, trade shows, DIY step-by-steps in magazines,” says Lawrence. 

The Transition Blush line arrived online on May 27. In a strange coincidence, Edeme’s edition of MACzine dropped on the same day, the cover featuring a blushing Olandria Carthen. The zine opens with the subtitle ‘The Art of Gradient Blush’. “It truly was a full circle moment for us,” Edeme told Dazed. “We’ve been through so much hate with this blush journey, so to have it cemented by none other than the legendary MAC Cosmetics… words cannot even describe.” 

Edeme’s memories of developing the third issue of MAC’s digital zine came as she headed to South Africa for a NYX masterclass. “Teaching has always been my passion and my driving force in this,” she says. “I purposely held off on teaching until I felt like I had perfected my technique.” While online conversations were still questioning authorship over the technique, Edeme was on her way to share it.