How Your New Beauty Routine Can Turn the Tables on White Supremacy
By: Allison Gaines
Tags: Women, Equality, Race, BlackLivesMatter, Beauty

How Your New Beauty Routine Can Turn the Tables on White Supremacy

Black women should embrace their natural glow

In the classic fairytale, Snow White, the evil queen peers into a magic mirror. Then she asks her famous question, “Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?” She expected the mirror to tell her that she was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. It seems almost comical that the powerful Queen awaits validation from the enchanted mirror instead of treasuring her beauty. Nevertheless, many women can relate to looking outside of themselves for approval at least a time or two. Furthermore, the word “fair” is doing a lot in this context.

Fair is an archaic word for beautiful. In modern usage, it usually refers to a light complexion — and it’s hard to forget that we’re talking about a story where the main character’s claim to fame is that her skin is extraordinarily pale (Domonoske, 2014).

Snow White’s story reflects the European beauty standard so vividly. To become the most beautiful throughout the kingdom, one must also be fair and thus very light-skinned.

In English literature, authors like Shakespeare often referred to beautiful women as “fair.” Culturally, the word fair has come to mean just, reasonable, and legitimate. It becomes clear that calling their women “fair,” and then associating their skin with the same term places moral legitimacy on their skin color while dismissing the validity of darker-skinned women.

Associating beauty with fairness makes sense in a homogenous culture. However, Americans live in a diverse culture. Europeans colonized Africa and enslaved African people in America, the Caribbean, and South America, thus placing themselves at the highest peak on the social hierarchy. This oppressive relationship makes their selective praise sustenance for white dominance.

The conflation of beauty and paleness hardly came out of nowhere. Petrarch’s Laura, the archetypal object of love poetry, was golden-haired. The idealized beauties of Renaissance paintings were alabaster-skinned (though the presence of people of color in medieval and Renaissance art shouldn’t be ignored). And when Elizabethan women wore skin-lightening makeup, they followed a tradition hearkening back to the Roman era (Domonoske, 2014).

Traditional English writers associate darkness with immorality, as seen in the terms “black mail, black magic,” and “blackhearted.” The Standard English language perpetuates a consistent degradation of Blackness and a worshiping of whiteness. Even in the modern era, a simple Google search for synonyms for dark will reveal terms like tragic, disastrous, catastrophic, cataclysmic, ruinous, devastating, hideous, gruesome, grisly, monstrous, and wretched, to name a few. Thus, the societal connotations have not changed as much as many would like to believe. White cultural fixation on fair-skinned women comes from historical and contemporary exposure to negative systemic linguistic associations.

That association between beauty and whiteness has proved hard to shake (Donnella, 2019).

Many say that beauty is in the beholder’s eyes, making them akin to our story’s enchanted mirror. This saying gives the viewer the unearned sovereignty to assess someone’s aesthetic value. Sure, we all have opinions about someone’s appearance and even our own. However, our perspective is only an interpretation of reality. Denying someone’s beauty does not undermine their beauty but instead reflects the observer’s inability to value their unique qualities. Eurocentric culture should not get to dictate who is beautiful and who is unsightly.

In America, the beauty industry is only beginning to diversify examples of beautiful women. Much of their depictions over the years displayed mainly white women, placing them at the center of hair, skincare, and makeup commercials. Limiting portrayals of beautiful Black and multicultural women memorialized the falsehood that only women with fair skin deserve tribute.

The beauty industry did not change by chance or through an admission of guilt. Instead, it bent under tremendous pressure from Black women who changed their buying habits away from self-alteration products to self-adoration products.

This journey involves a lot of self-reflection and asking tough questions, and it may be uncomfortable at times, but it’s necessary to grow and evolve (Driver, 2020).

Many women reject European beauty norms within the Black Liberation movement to embrace their body’s natural characteristics. This movement began to make a dent in the beauty industry’s earnings as many women engaged in transformative economic resistance. Hair relaxer sales have steadily declined since the late 1990s, reflecting a cultural shift in the Black community. In addition to hair care companies, many beauty companies had to take their skin bleaching products off of shelves, while others decreased sales.

Black women and women of color have been demanding more from their beauty products. Many want cruelty-free, vegan, and environmentally sustainable products. While the mainstream beauty lines have always been behind the curve in catering to Black women’s needs, small independent businesses cropped up to fill in the gap.

This decolonization journey has brought me to some incredible Black-owned and largely female-owned skincare brands. A lot of them are natural, with beautifully clean ingredients (Walton, 2020).

Every Black woman deserves to live in a world that appreciates her and does not denigrate her for being a Black person. However, Black women should not wait for some arbitrary moment of clarity with white women or the beauty industry. Instead, they must chart their way forward, embracing their brown skin. If Black women want to turn the tables on white supremacy, they must commit to decolonization.