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Letting The Person In Front of Me Decide My Makeup Routine

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A stranger’s shopping cart became James Charles’ makeup bag for a day.

James Charles took the drive-thru ordering challenge that had been circulating across YouTube and gave it a beauty twist. Instead of letting a stranger order his fast food, he let a stranger dictate his entire face of makeup — sight unseen, no vetoes, no swaps. The result is “Letting The Person In Front of Me Decide My Makeup Routine,” a video built entirely around one simple dare: whatever the person ahead of him in the Ulta checkout line bought, he’d buy too, and then he’d have to make it work.

• Charles queued up behind an unsuspecting shopper at an Ulta Beauty store and purchased the identical cosmetic products she checked out with.
• Back in his studio, he applied a full face using only those stranger-selected items, forcing him to abandon his usual brands and signature techniques.
• The video closes with Charles announcing a large beauty product giveaway for viewers.

The Ulta Ambush

The premise runs on the same logic as the drive-thru challenge that had been making the rounds online, except the transaction happens at the register of an Ulta Beauty store instead of a fast-food window. Charles gets in line behind a shopper who has no idea she’s about to design a YouTube star’s makeup look, watches what she puts on the counter, and then buys the exact same haul once she’s out the door. There’s no substituting a similar shade or skipping a product he doesn’t like — whatever landed in her basket is what he’s stuck with.

That’s the whole gimmick, and it’s also what makes the video work: Charles has zero input on the products until he’s already committed to using them. It’s less a makeup tutorial than a controlled experiment in giving up creative control, the kind of format that’s become a staple for beauty YouTubers looking to break out of the usual “get ready with me” mold.

Working Outside His Comfort Zone

Charles built his following on a specific skill set — sharp winged liner, blended cut creases, a signature glam style he’s repeated across brand campaigns and tutorials. This challenge strips that away. Whatever formulas, finishes, and shade ranges the stranger happened to prefer, he has to make cohesive on camera, in real time, without his go-to products as a fallback.

Whatever she bought is what I have to work with — no swaps, no substitutions.

That constraint is the entertainment value. Viewers aren’t watching Charles execute a look he’s mastered; they’re watching him problem-solve with mismatched textures and unfamiliar formulas, the same way any regular shopper would if they’d grabbed random products off a shelf. It’s a format that flips his usual authority as a beauty expert into something closer to improvisation.

The Giveaway Payoff

Charles doesn’t just end the video with a finished face — he closes it out by announcing a large-scale beauty product giveaway for his audience, turning the challenge into an incentive for viewers to stick around to the final minute. It’s a structure that’s become common across his channel and plenty of others covered in pieces on celebrities and reality personalities, where the hook up front gets paid off with a reward at the close.

The giveaway also reinforces what the whole format is selling: access. Just as the stranger in line had no idea her Ulta haul was about to become content, Charles is handing his own audience a chance to end up with free product simply for watching the bit through to the end.

The challenge doesn’t resolve with Charles crowning the stranger’s product picks a triumph or a disaster — it just ends with him working through whatever landed in that basket, giveaway details on screen, and the door open for him to run the same dare again with a different shopper the next time he’s back at Ulta.