Chapter 1

Beauty

Pretty for a Black Girl

There is a beauty revolution going down and the admiral of the Rihanna Navy is marching in the vanguard. Pop chanteuse, style icon, and giver of no fucks, Rihanna launched her Fenty makeup brand in 2017 and upended the cosmetics game, creating a “Fenty effect” that pushed beauty brands to offer a wider range of makeup shades and blew open the door to independent Black beauty brands.¹

“It changed everything,” says Patrice Grell Yursik, founder of Afrobella, a holistic beauty blog. “Now we get to see what happens when [Black women] are shifted to the center of the beauty perspective, rather than the margins.”²

Designed with the ethos “beauty for all,” the brand boasted forty different shades of foundation at launch, finally accommodating the breadth of Black skin tones, from alabaster to onyx.³ There, promoting the brand in the debut campaign, was Slick Woods, bald-headed, juicy lips parted to reveal an imperfectly perfect wide-gapped smile; Halimah Aden, strutting in her hijab; and Leomie Anderson, hair brushing against impossibly smooth mahogany skin.⁴ Fenty included Black women and recognized their unique and diverse beauty like no other brand had before.

It’s about damned time.

When I began wearing makeup as a teen in the ’80s, finding the right shade was a trial. Inexpensive drugstore brands were clearly manufactured without me in mind—the deepest shade at Walgreens might accommodate a White girl with a slight tan but not my brown skin. Even the two Black department store brands, Flori Roberts and Fashion Fair, had very limited options. Nearly forty years later, Black model Nykhor Paul, who has walked the runway for Vivienne Westwood and others, was still complaining on Instagram about being ignored by the beauty industry: “Why do I have to bring my own makeup to a professional show when all the white girls don’t have to do anything but show up.”⁵

Naomi Wolf says in The Beauty Myth that “today’s woman has become her ‘beauty.’”⁶ A certain amount of artifice has become a near imperative of walking in the world as a woman. A lash of color on the cheeks. The shaping of a brow. Makeup is a woman’s most common connection to beauty. And beauty is important in a society that unfairly values women based on their attractiveness to heterosexual men.

Bre Rivera used to wear makeup, though she doesn’t have a particular fondness for it and enjoys the feel of clean skin. “I understood that’s what women do.” As a trans woman, Bre saw makeup as a key part of survival, though she eventually gave up cosmetics, ironically, for her own safety.⁷

“[Makeup] allowed people not to see me as a trans person,” she says. “You go to the store; you look cute. Other people see that you look cute. And then that invites them to want to get to know you. I found myself getting into sticky situations where I would be out and about, someone would be interested, and then I would disclose [that I am trans] and they would be, like, super [mad].”

If beauty and womanhood are symbiotic, that a $50 billion cosmetic industry has historically ignored Black women is surely illustrative of who big brands believe get to be beautiful and get to be women. The Great Black Beauty Lie is one of myriad ways America gaslights Black women. It tells them they are ugly while colonizing bits of their aesthetic and calling it beauty, replacing Black women—even in their own communities’ presentations of desirable womanhood—with watered down facsimiles or sisters whose looks hew closest to the White ideal.

Never the Pretty One

Thirty-nine-year-old Heather Carper grew up in Kansas and learned at least one lesson very early: “Black girls were never the cute ones. You could be ‘cute for a Black girl,’ but you were never the pretty one.”⁸

To be an American woman of any race is to be judged against constantly changing and arbitrary measures of attractiveness. One decade, being waif thin is in; the next, it’s all about an ass with its own area code. Wake up one morning, and suddenly your lady parts “need” to be shaved smooth and your gapless thighs are all wrong. The beauty and fashion industries are dedicated to ensuring that women keep chasing an impossible ideal, like Botoxed hamsters running on the wheel of beauty standards.

But while expectations for how Western women should look have evolved over centuries, one thing has remained constant, and that is Black women’s place at the bottom of the hierarchy. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson praised the skin color, “flowing hair,” and “elegant symmetry of form” possessed by White people, writing that Black men prefer the comeliness of White women “as uniformly as is the preference of the [orangutan] for the Black women over those of his own species.”⁹ Stereotypes of Black women were designed in part to provide the antithesis to the inherent loveliness of White women, leaving other women of color to jockey for position between the poles of beauty.¹⁰ Old beliefs die hard. Hundreds of years later, in 2011, the London School of Economics evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa published a series of graphs and numbers at Psychology Today, “proving” that Black women are “far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women.”¹¹ Because … science.

Neither a Beast nor Fetish Be

The inferiority of Black beauty has been reinforced partly through popular culture. In allegedly liberal Hollywood, Black women are nearly invisible as romantic partners. American fashion catwalks were so White in the early 2010s that former model and activist Bethann Hardison formed the Diversity Coalition to challenge whitewashed runways and was moved to pen an open letter to the industry:

Since then, models of color have increased on New York Fashion Week (NYFW) catwalks. Nearly half of all models cast during the Big Apple’s spring 2020 fashion week were people of color—up from under 21 percent in spring 2015.¹⁴ But Black beauty is still marginalized, even within subcultures that pride themselves on subverting mainstream values, according to twenty-seven-year-old Black Witch,^* who is active in pagan, punk, and Lolita fashion communities. Lolita fashion originated in Japan and is inspired by frilly, Victorian-era dress—lots of petticoats and delicate fabrics. Black Witch says that many of her fellow community members see Lolita femininity as at odds with Black womanhood.

“They call us ugly. They say we look uncivilized in the clothes,” she says. “I once heard a person say, ‘I’m not racist, but that looks like an ape in a dress.’”¹⁵

Increasingly, Black women are even absent in our own culture’s illustrations of beauty.

“I don’t really watch music videos anymore, but I have noticed that White girls are the ‘it thing’ now,” says Liz Hurston,^* thirty-four. “When hip-hop first came out, you had your video girls that looked like Keisha from down the block, and then they just started getting lighter and lighter. Eventually Black women were completely phased out and it was Latinas and biracial women. Now it’s White women. On one hand, thank God we’re no longer being objectified, but on the other hand, it’s kind of sad, because now our beauty doesn’t count at all.”¹⁶

Seeming to confirm Liz’s observation, in 2006 Kanye West told Essence magazine, a publication for Black women, that “If it wasn’t for race mixing, there’d be no video girls…. Me and most of my friends like mutts [biracial women] a lot.”¹⁷

Speaking of presidential hopeful West, his would-be First Lady Kim Kardashian is a pioneer of the galling trend of White women copying and commodifying elements of Black women’s style and phenotype, benefitting from Black femme cool and carrying none of the burden.¹⁸

Journalist Wanna Thompson coined the term “Blackfishing” to describe White women “cosplaying” as Black women.¹⁹ The Kardashian and Jenner sisters have long been accused of using plastic surgery, makeup, Photoshop, and elements of style, like box braids, to mimic the appearance of Black women. In fall of 2020 the internet went wild when a photo of Khloe Kardashian surfaced with brown skin, full lips, and brown hair that made her look more like Beyoncé from the Third Ward not a White girl from Calabasas.²⁰ Blackness is so fastened to the KarJenner empire that even Black folks frequently argue whether the sisters can rightly be called “women of color.” (Robert Kardashian, Kris Jenner, and Caitlyn Jenner—parents to the sisters—are White. The late Robert Kardashian has Armenian heritage.)²¹

The Kardashians are not alone in capitalizing on Black women’s style. In a 2018 Twitter thread and an article in Paper magazine, Thompson called out several White women influencers who had been successfully impersonating Black women on social media, gaining followings, partnerships, and brand sponsorships.

“With extensive lip fillers, dark tans and attempts to manipulate their hair texture, white women wear Black women’s features like a costume,” Thompson wrote. “These are the same features that, once derided by mainstream white culture, are now coveted and dictate current beauty and fashion on social media, with Black women’s contributions being erased all the while.”²²

This disturbing trend reinforces that when it comes to being beautiful as a woman in America, just a dab of Blackness will do. But it puts the lie to the idea that Black women’s appearance and style are deficient. If anything, they are coveted; it is only when those features and elements of style are attached to unfiltered Blackness that they become “ugly.”

And in a society that judges women’s value and femininity based on attractiveness, perceived ugliness can be devastating. The denigration of Black female beauty not only batters African American women’s self-esteem, it also drives a wedge between Black women with lighter skin, straighter hair, and narrower features and those without those privileges.

Thirty-five-year-old Erin Millender says that the time she felt least attractive was as a teenager. “I went to a very White high school with a very J.Crew aesthetic,” she says. “I was brown. I am built stocky. I’ve always had a butt … and not a tiny, little gymnast booty either. I was aware of the fact that I did not conform to the beauty standard.”²³

Erin is biracial. Her mother is Korean American and her father is Black. Many would see her light-brown skin and shiny curls and note her advantage over Black women with darker skin, broader features, and kinkier hair. But Erin says that in school she was teased for “anything that was identifiably Black. White kids don’t know the difference between various grades of nap. They see frizzy hair and brown skin? That’s just nappy hair to them—the same as any other kind of Black hair. Brown skin and a big booty gets ‘ghetto booty.’”

But at the predominantly Black schools she attended before high school, Erin says some Black girls targeted her, jealously pulling the long hair that brought her closer to the ideal of mainstream beauty. “Then, after school, in ballet, White girls made fun of my butt.”

And the attention of men like West, who fetishize biracial women, is no honor. “[It is] creepy and insulting.” Erin says that far too often that appreciation comes with backhanded compliments “implying that I don’t really look Black and would be less attractive if I did,” plus “shade” from other Black women, “who assume I think I’m better than somebody.”

Black looks are not just erased; features commonly associated with people of the African diaspora are openly denigrated in American culture. (Though it is important to note that Blackness is diverse. Black women can be freckled, ginger, and nappy; ebony skinned and fine haired; and every variation in between.)

Get the Kinks Out

Hair has been a lightning rod for enforcement of White standards of beauty. And reactions to Black women’s natural hair help illustrate the broader disdain for Black appearance. While Black hair can have a variety of textures, most tends to be curly, coily, or nappy. It grows out and up and not down. It may not shine. It may be cottony or wiry. It is likely more easily styled in an Afro puff than a smooth chignon. For centuries, Black women have been told that these qualities make their hair unsightly, unprofessional, and uniquely difficult to manage.

The late Don Imus infamously called the Black women on the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”²⁴ In the summer of 2007, a Glamour magazine editor sparked outrage among many Black working women when she told an assembled group of female attorneys that wearing natural Black hair is not only improper but militant.²⁵ Even the US military has been ambivalent about Black women’s hair. In 2014, new military grooming guidelines—since changed—provoked furor among Black servicewomen and prompted a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel from the women of the Congressional Black Caucus. The guidelines had banned styles traditional for Black women without altered hair textures and also referred to some hair (guess whose) as “matted” and “unkempt.”²⁶

In 2019, the Eleventh US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it is legal to refuse to hire someone with dreadlocs. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had filed suit against Catastrophe Management Solutions of Mobile, Alabama, after that company rescinded a job offer to a Black woman who refused to cut her locs. The HR manager worried the woman’s hair “might” get messy.²⁷

The message that Black natural hair is innately “wrong” is one that girls receive early. In 2013, two cases of Black girls being punished at school for their natural hair made headlines. Seven-year-old Tiana Parker was sent home from an Oklahoma charter school and threatened with expulsion because her dreadlocs were deemed “faddish” and unacceptable under a school code that also banned Afros.²⁸ Twelve-year-old Vanessa VanDyke also faced expulsion because of her voluminous natural hair that Florida school authorities found “distracting.”²⁹ In 2018, viral video caught eleven-year-old Faith Fennidy crying as she packed up her school bag. She had been asked to leave the classroom, told her braided hair extensions violated school rules.³⁰

Is it any wonder, after generations in a society that affirms White features while disparaging those associated with Blackness, that many in the African American community have internalized negative messages about their appearance and learned that beauty requires disguising, altering, or diluting Blackness and that we pass that inferiority complex on to younger generations?

Patrice Grell Yursik does her share of counseling Black women scarred by a lifetime of beauty insecurity and parents who could not transcend their own conditioning. She shares a memorable conversation she once had with the mother of a young Black child with cerebral palsy. The woman confessed to using double the recommended amount of a caustic chemical relaxer on her daughter’s hair in an effort to make it straight. The mother was distraught that despite her efforts, the child’s hair held on to its kinks.³¹

“I was horrified. It made me want to cry,” says Patrice. “This poor child who cannot fend for herself and cannot physically take care of herself is enduring this burning on an ongoing basis for what? So she can be what? Why are we doing this?”

It should come as no surprise that many Black women, rather than wear the braids, twists, Afros, and dreadlocs that Black hair adapts to most easily, alter their hair’s natural texture chemically or with extreme heat or cover it with synthetic hair or human hair from other races of women.

Let me be clear: Black women should be free to wear their hair as they please, including straightened. But as Patrice urges, “It’s really important for us to ask ourselves the tough questions. Why are we in lockstep in relaxing our hair? Why do we all come to the decision that this is something we have to do for ourselves and our children, [especially when] so many of us hate the process and see damage from it?

“Always do what makes you happy, but at least know why it’s the thing that makes you happy.”

During the “Black is beautiful” 1970s, many Black women embraced their natural kinks, but that rebellion gave way to assimilation in the Reagan era. The popularity of neo-soul music in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with its iconic faces such as Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, and Angie Stone representing for natural hair, opened the door for a new generation of women to embrace the nap.³²

The challenge was that many would-be naturals found little support in traditional places for beauty advice, including beauty magazines (even ones catering to Black women) and professional stylists. Often, even mothers and grandmothers were of no help; the hair care that many Black women learned from their fore-mothers was solely focused on “fixing” or “taming” natural hair, not on celebrating its innate qualities. Many Black women had not seen or managed their natural texture in decades. Black beauty magazines such as Essence continued to mostly feature models with straightened hair. And, until the recent renaissance, education for beauticians included little to no training about the care of natural Black hair. Stylists were tested only on their ability to handle straightened Black tresses.³³

What is profound about the natural hair revolution is that it has been driven by everyday Black women searching for a way to honor their natural features in spite of all the messages encouraging the contrary. Finding no support in the usual places, Black women created what they needed, forming communities online. Forums buzzed with women offering support and maintenance and styling techniques when family, boyfriends, and employers rejected the natural look. Women with similar hair types learned from one another’s trials and errors. Naturals pored through Fotki (a precursor to Flickr) to find photos of cute natural styles on everyday women. Naturals began eschewing the preservatives and chemicals in mainstream beauty products and instead searched for natural alternatives. Black women such as Jamyla Bennu, founder of Oyin Handmade, began creating natural products in their own kitchens and selling them.³⁴

“I didn’t come from a family where people had [chemical relaxers],” Jamyla says. “My mom’s hair is very loose; it’s not like mine, so she didn’t have the skills to do the cornrows and stuff like that. I was the Afro puff girl. Although it was always affirmed, there were not a lot of ideas about how to wear my natural hair.”

Jamyla muddled through, finally beginning to relax her own hair in junior high school. But seeing more natural women in college opened her eyes to new options. “‘Oh my gosh, that’s what you’re supposed to do with it! You can twist it. You can braid it.’ I stopped perming my hair and have had natural hair ever since.”

In about 1999, Jamyla began making hair products for herself “out of general craftiness.” She experimented with common ingredients, like honey, coconut oil, and olive oil, that she had grown up using in her beauty routine. And, true to the ethos of the time, she shared her recipes. A freelance website designer, she eventually took a chance and began offering a few of her products online. Today, Jamyla and her partner, her husband Pierre, have not only a thriving online store but a brick-and-mortar retail space in Baltimore. And Oyin Handmade products can be found in select Target and Whole Foods stores across the country.

The natural hair movement is “an example of women deciding for themselves what’s important, what’s beautiful, what’s natural…. Not only how they want to look, but what they want to use to make themselves look that way. It’s a really empowering moment in Black beauty history and in beauty industry history because it’s a kind of user-driven change.”

Jamyla, like several other Black women, has become a successful entrepreneur through the Black beauty renaissance, but she has done so in a way that is uniquely affirming, unlike most consumer beauty brands. When my first box from Oyin arrived in the mail, it included a small container of bubble solution, two pieces of hard candy, and a card that read “Hello, Beautiful.”

Jamyla says that approach comes from “myself as consumer, as a feminist, as a person who loves being Black, who loves natural hair. I was in a place of pure celebration and discovery, and so was everyone else around me. So were the people with whom I was sharing the product. It didn’t even make sense to try to market as if to a deficit or a lack, because I didn’t see a deficit or a lack.

“A lot of Black women grow up with so much negative messaging around their hair—not only from the marketing, which is, ‘Fix it by doing X, Y and Z.’” Jamyla points out that caregivers often frame Black girls’ hair as a problem from the time they are small. “Sometimes we’ll get messages like, ‘Oh, this stuff. It’s just so hard to deal with.’

“My political feeling is that it is very serious work to love yourself as a Black person in America. I think it’s an intergenerational project of transformation and healing that we are embarking on together.”

Jamyla says that when she found herself with a platform to reach Black women, it was important to deliver an empowering message. “You know that this is fly, right? I know you know it’s fly, I’m going to echo that to you so that you can feel a little bit stronger in knowing how fly you are.”

Now, mainstream beauty and cosmetics industries are playing catch-up in the movement Black women began. Not only are homegrown brands like Oyin enjoying broad success, but major cosmetics companies have debuted lines catering to Black women who wear their hair texture unaltered. In 2014, Revlon purchased Carol’s Daughter, a beauty company with roots in the natural hair movement.³⁵ Even Hollywood is taking notice, thanks to stylists like Felicia Leatherwood, who keeps natural heads looking good on the red carpet.³⁶ Her styling of actress Teyonah Parris (Mad Men, WandaVision) made all the flashbulbs pop at the 2013 Screen Actors Guild awards. Buzzfeed gushed that the actress had “the flyest hair on the red carpet.”³⁷

“We never thought that would happen,” said Leatherwood of the attention-getting coif. And perhaps neither did Parris, when she first did what many Black women call “the big chop”—cutting off relaxed hair, usually leaving short kinks or coils. Parris told Huffington Post: “I cried. I cried. I was not used to seeing myself like that, I did not want to walk outside…. My [friend] … had to literally come over to my house and walk me outside because it was such an emotional experience, and it wasn’t just about hair. It was what my perception of beauty was and had been for all of my life, and then I look at myself in the mirror and I’m like, ‘That doesn’t look like what I thought was beautiful.’”³⁸

Since 2016, sales of hair relaxers are down 23 percent. And in 2021, there are many more places where Black women can see their beauty, including their hair, reflected back to them in all the different ways it flowers.

Patrice Grell Yursik, who is often called the Godmother of Brown Beauty, wonders if she would be Afrobella today if she had come of age with access to all of the brands and influencers available to young women today. “Not to say that I don’t wish it existed. But I think that the lack of inspiration and available makeup and hair products forced a generation of us to become the creative force that we are now.”

When Patrice went natural in 2002, she too went online for guidance and noticed a void of women who look like her tackling broader topics of beauty, including body image, skin care, makeup, and fashion.

“I’m a big girl. My hair is natural. I might have some skin problems. I’m trying to figure out what makeup looks good on me. Nobody was really holistically giving me that.”

And so, in 2004, when Patrice launched Afrobella, she drew from her own journey to self-acceptance, including coming to terms with her body.

Fierce, Fat, and Fashionable

For a country with a growing rate of obesity, America is remarkably unforgiving when it comes to fat women. Fat Black women have become lazy, comedy shorthand. Want to bring on the cheap laughs? Then trot out an oversized brown-skinned lady. Even better, despite her fatness and Blackness, make her think she is attractive and worthy of amorous attention. (Think Rasputia, in Eddie Murphy’s film Norbit, or Kenan Thompson’s blessedly defunct character Virginiaca on Saturday Night Live—hulking, sexually aggressive laughingstocks.)

“My weight has always been at the forefront of things that would weigh me down emotionally and make me feel like I was less attractive than other people,” says Patrice Grell Yursik. “I’ve always been a big girl. When I wasn’t a big girl, it was because I was bulimic.”⁴⁰

Patrice, though now a Chicagoan, grew up in a well-to-do neighborhood in Trinidad, where her friends and neighbors tended to be light skinned and thin. “I used to have to really psych myself up to go out because I would feel so unattractive next to my friends.”

She hid her body under big, shapeless clothes. “I never used to wear sleeveless things. I felt very, very self-conscious of the stretch marks at the top of my arm and the fact that my arms had a little swing to them.”

But one day, as she walked across her college campus in warm weather, a classmate, clad in jeans and a little sleeveless top, asked, “Aren’t you hot wearing sleeves all the time?”

“I had never thought about it, because it was just my defense mechanism. [But I wondered,] ‘Why do I feel the need to cover this thing up that is just a part of myself? To try and hide something that anybody could have seen anyway? Why am I trying to hide my arm fat?’ I’m a big girl. I get hot, just like any other human being.”

That moment began Patrice’s transformation into the style maven thousands of women follow. “It was like I started to really come into my femininity and feel more comfortable with whatever that was. I had to define it on my own terms.”

It is hard to reconcile beauty insecurity with the woman who took the stage at the TEDxPortofSpain event in 2013. Seeing Patrice standing on stage in a leather motorcycle jacket and long fuchsia skirt, a halo of burgundy kinks surrounding an impeccably made-up face, leaves no doubt why she is sometimes called the Godmother of Brown Beauty. She is fierce. But the message she delivered that day was even stronger: all women can be beautiful on their own terms. It is a notion that she says underpins the Black beauty revolution, which allows African American women, even those with kinky hair, large bodies, brown skin, and broad features, “a place at the table.”

Many Black women have been liberated by that lesson.

Heather Carper says she feels beautiful more often now than when she was a kid in Kansas. She says part of her evolution from “pretty for a Black girl” to beautiful woman involved the realization that attractiveness is not as narrowly defined as mainstream culture would have women believe. Her mother once told her, “When you appraise art, you look for color and texture. With your skin and your hair, you will never lack either.”

“The view of what makes you pretty is very dictated to you when you’re younger. Whether it’s the media or your peers, there is a whole lot of looking for external validation for what’s pretty. You’re just kind of checking in with everybody: ‘Is that pretty? Is she pretty? Is this outfit pretty?’ Part of getting older is that you stop checking in so much about whether what you like is cool with everyone else. You know, it may not ever be cool. But you know what? I like it. My beauty falls into that, too.”⁴¹

Patrice says, “I always knew that there was something different about me, and I used to want to hide that difference when I was younger; to assimilate, to blend in. As I grew older, I realized: Why am I going to fight what I am? I am made to be a beautiful woman on my own terms, why not just embrace that and be that?

“Am I going to hate myself forever … or am I going to be free?”⁴²