Years ago, I knew myself. When I was a child, I felt solid and still. I felt like me. I didn’t care about facades or about wearing the kind of mask Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote about in his poem “We Wear The Mask”. In his poem, he wrote about the mask our ancestors wore to survive, assimilate, and cope with being members of the marginalized race. As I grew in age, I ironically regressed in wisdom and adopted a persona akin to the mask Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote about in his poem. Hints of this mask appeared in my life in many ways; among them, my physical appearance.

A few years ago, something triggered my memory of my younger, more authentic self and made me realize somewhere on my journey, I lost me. Among the many other tools I used to shape and apply my mask, makeup was one tool I used to construct the physical mask the outside world had come to know as me.

Makeup became my mask and aided me in forming an etch-a-sketch of myself; a generic automaton; a version deemed acceptable by popular culture. One chilly Saturday afternoon, as I applied my makeup to meet friends at a nearby winery, I had an epiphany. I was in my twenties and my makeup routine was not one that I created, but one I’d learned, adopted, and memorized from bingeing youtube tutorials. My hand moved without conscious communication from my mind, proof that this ritual was carved in my memory and something I didn't really think about. In a shade of brown slightly lighter than my skin, I covered the acne that formed on my temples from not drinking enough water and the acne along my jawline from consuming too much dairy. I dipped my brush in finely crushed loose powder. It was mahogany tinted, a color slightly darker than my skin. I tapped the excess powder away and drew two darker curved lines along the edges that bordered the bridge and the corners of my nose. I applied a beige cream, a color much lighter than my own skin, in a line directly in the center of my nose. I applied the same cream on the outside of my nostrils and blended. When I was done, I stepped back a few inches and admired the illusion before me. My nose was now thinner, sharper, more angled, and lacking the fullness my ancestors gifted to me. My skin was just a bit lighter than before. As I observed my altered features, I heard a voice inside my head. It asked questions I’ll never forget. “Who are you trying to look like? What are you trying to look like and why?”

Then, it hit me. I was erasing myself, rejecting myself, disrespecting myself, and as a result, harming myself. When you reject someone, you cause them emotional harm. So, why would the result be any different just because the victim of rejection isn’t outside of you but within you? Now, obviously, there are ways one can use makeup to highlight and enhance one’s natural beauty instead of erasing it; but, that is definitely not at all what I was doing for years. Too many of us participate in feature erasure during our beauty routines; if we don’t practice, many of us are complicit. Now, I think we can all agree that the natural hair movement caused many of us to embrace our hair, but many of us still struggle with accepting our other features.

Pumariega, Gustavson, Gustavson, Stone Motes, and Ayers (1994) found that “Black women were more likely to engage in skin bleaching, excessive hair care, and the willingness to endure financial debt related to beauty.”

Many say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Realistically, popularized standards of beauty are determined by media and culture, then internalized by the consumers of media and culture(us). So, how much of our ideas about beauty come from us, and how much come from the media? Who controls the media? And what culture controls much of the media? With the exception of the appropriation of full lips--a natural feature of members of the African diaspora-- popularized images in the media feature women that mainly fit a Eurocentric aesthetic. Anti-African images, undoubtedly, are internalized by consumers(us) and many times subconsciously cause the consumer to become a violator of self. When we erase our natural features, we violate ourselves.

In many ways, this violation is a mimicry of what the beauty industry has done to people who look like us for centuries. We are erased from the beauty industry; then, we consume, digest, and internalize that erasure, and repeat the pattern by erasing our natural selves. The cycle of anti-blackness continues through us.

On the journey of relearning myself, I’ve learned to redefine beauty and restructure my beauty routines. I’ve learned to create my own beauty routine. Instead of engaging in an hour-long session of feature erasure, I engage in small acts each day that help beautify my hair, skin, and nails. I try my best to participate in acts that ground me spiritually and help improve my physical body. I listen to the acne on my skin, the health of my hair, the thoughts in my mind and act accordingly to meet my needs. I limit media intake because I know how easily I can internalize messages. I connect with a high-power through mediation, prayer, and yoga. I connect with myself through journaling, dance, and gardening. When I apply makeup, I do so minimally and lightly, focusing on enhancing my features, not modifying them. I’m getting to know me again, inwardly and outwardly.

Through this reacquaintance with myself, I’m gaining respect for the physical features given to me by my ancestors. There are days I still struggle with keeping my mask entirely off, but things are better than they used to be. To be yourself is a revolutionary act. To be authentically you, especially as a Black woman in a patriarchal, Eurocentric country, no matter how different you might be from the popularized image of beauty, is a necessary act of resistance. To be inwardly and outwardly maskless and boxless, despite what society tells you, is revolutionary. So, I’d love to know, what are some things you do to remove the mask and honor who you are?

REFERENCES: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4713035/

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The Revolution is You: Why Being Your Authentic Self is Revolutionary