Anyone who knows me well knows how Afrocentric I am. I remember watching Oluchi win Face of Africa and I thought to myself, I can do this. So… my dream of modelling was birthed. I started starving myself at 16, I thought I was not skinny enough. I knew I was tall enough. I believed I was African enough but when I saw the call for models the next year and it read, “must be an A cup or nothing”. Haha! I was definitely very very far from an A cup at 17 years. To make it more interesting, I heard I may not be called to the Nigerian Bar if I modelled. Well… that is how my dream of modelling died. I was not what they were looking for and being a lawyer meant more to me than being a model. Oh well, c’est la vie.
I wanted so badly to be recognised as beautiful. I wanted to tell myself and everyone who teased me in secondary school that I was not ugly. However, everything around me kept saying that I was not pretty enough. I internalised it for a very long time. At that time, I failed to realise that I define my beauty. I was a teenager who desperately wanted to fit in per the world’s standards. Cosmo and Seventeen Magazines did not help either, their beauty standards were not women that looked like me. Growing up, the physical features I thought made me ugly are the features about myself I have come to love, own and appreciate. The wide nose, the height (Lord, if I got a $ for every time I was called, tall for nothing), or the dark skin. Is it the freakishly large boobs that made people think I was this promiscuous porn star. Now, I can laugh about it but I slouched for most of my teen years and twenties because I wanted to hide the big boobs and 6'1 height. Interestingly, I did not even fit into the “African” standards for beauty. I was not curvy enough. (An entirely different blog post). Oh… or the times I was compared to the Africans depicted in Tintin comics, I carried the ugly toga for a very long time and I probably only dropped it in my thirties. To be honest, I still struggle with it most times.
Entering my twenties, I discovered Ebony and Jet Magazines, American magazines that had women who looked like me, nice, but they were in America. I struggled to relate but it was close enough. In the early 2000s, True Love Magazine from South Africa comes in, then Genevieve Magazine, Nigerian content. Yippee!!! Representation matters, no matter how insignificant we think it is, representation matters. Seeing people who look like you, have similar features, fears, and stories are important for multiple reasons. My nose can never be pointed and thin, neither can my hair be naturally straight and malleable. Now I saw women with my kind of hair, products for my kind of skin, and makeup for my kind of skin tone. We need to be mindful about projecting Western standards of beauty on ourselves, our daughters, and the children around us. As I got older, I learned that my African features made me different, I was not weirdly ugly, I was exceptionally beautiful. People have different standards of beauty. That is okay. What is not okay, is projecting those standards of beauty on others and holding them to those standards. What makes light skin, white skin, or brown skin, better than dark skin? Who made up the rules that dark skin is not good enough to be considered beautiful? Why do music artists prefer light-skinned video vixens, why do some organisations select lighter-skinned women for certain positions, and why are the representation of black families on television often light-skinned and Eurocentric featured people? These representations have made our daughters and sons believe that they are not good enough. As the world continues to evolve, more conversations around colourism and featurism must be had.
I remember when my youngest son, came home from school, feeling bad because he thought he was ugly. He is dark-skinned and his siblings are fairer-skinned. What made it worse was that his classmates teased him a lot about how dark he was. I went straight into reminding him that I am also dark-skinned. I told him his dark skin was rich with melanin and if he thought he was ugly, he also thought his mum (me), his aunties, and all other dark-skinned family members are ugly. I reminded him about how awesome he is and the greatness he carries inside. Needless to say, the young man has grown to be somewhat cocky and his introductions have become, “Hello, I’m awesome!” Bedroom walls in my house now have random motivational quotes where he writes things like, “Black is beauty, never forget”, and “it is okay to be different”. Indeed, that boy is my offspring.
Beauty is all around us. There is no singular approach to what beauty truly is. It is in people’s personalities. It is in the way they laugh. It is in the way they hold conversations. It is in the way their eyes light up when they talk about the things and people they love. Beauty is different for all of us and we must be okay with that. In an age where we are daily inundated to buy products that remind us of our imperfections and influencers with “perfect” bodies, it is easy to slip into self-deprecation. My suggestion is that you become deliberate about what social media and online content you choose to consume.
Dear Mum, look at those stretch marks, love handles, folds, and sagging boobs and fall in love with yourself. Remind yourself that you carried life, you birthed life, and you are nurturing life. Dear Woman, look at those things that you think make you imperfect and tell yourself that they make you uniquely beautiful. Dear You, you are no less deserving of a loving companion because you do not possess certain physical attributes.
Featurism, colourism, and racism have no place in our lives come 2022. We have navigated two years of a pandemic and difficult economic circumstances. It is time to drop the worries about beauty perceptions created by people who are probably dead. As we step into 2022, I want to ask you to look into the mirror and remind yourself of what makes you feel the most beautiful. Hold on to the answer you give yourself, foster that response, and then guard it jealously. If you do not mind sharing, please write your answer in the comments because I would love to cheer you on too.
Thank you for the support you have given me this past year and I look forward to us doing this next year. As I sign out for the year, I would like to wish you, my dear Reader, a very merry Christmas and a splendid New Year. Cheers to 2022 and the opportunities for love, wealth and health it presents.
xx
