The Beauty Story .....MY Beauty Story
The morning that this blog post was written, I saw a very ‘me’ kind of post. ‘Stop making content you hate’. I felt affirmed as this year I decided to make a few shifts in my content creation ways.
One of those shifts is to stop overthinking and letting that overthinking make me put things on the back burner. So here we are, with a term I coined for myself and my beauty influencer ways, THE BEAUTY STORY. For me, it's enormous. It means SO MUCH. Will I be able to articulate myself truly? I will give it my best shot.
I am a dark-skinned African woman. I did not grow up with affirming words from my mother. I didn’t have the ‘desired’ body shape. In fact, I was a chubby kid who started dieting at 16. Oh, and I wore [and still wear] spectacles. Mainstream media did not exalt anyone who looked like me. The boys always seemed to gravitate toward the lighter-skinned slender girls. For a long time, I was not even sure if I had any business discussing beauty let alone feeling it. I entered my early twenties feeling confused, unsure, and unseen.
Almost a decade later, NO ONE can’t shake my confidence regarding my beauty. I comfortably toe the line between arrogance and confidence. Strong, beautiful, healthy, graceful, soft, at ease with her self AND body, intelligent, wise, open, stunning, grounded, stubborn, [I could go on]...... all these attributes and MORE, I attribute to my beauty. To my beauty STORY. I worked incredibly hard to become the woman I am today. To FEEL the woman I am. I became committed to unpacking the suitcase of self hate and self-doubt, to understanding the importance of my food story [another story for another blog post, maybe…] and how it is a core part of my beauty story, to be incredibly comfortable and IN LOVE with features of my body that I was told [very insidiously, I may add] that devalued me. I have earned the dance I dance between arrogance and confidence. I had to give myself that kind of love because it was never given to me and I had finally gotten to the point where no one owed to me. I owed it to myself.
Do you get it? Do you feel the weight of my words? I hope you do. I can only be assured of those who share my experience [dark-skinned African women], I know you get it. I can only hope by sharing what my beauty story means to me that it can inspire you to re-write your beauty story.
Why you may ask?
Because you owe it to yourself.
Because your daughters need you to have a solid beauty story.
Because the beauty industry makes far too much money out of our insecurities and confusion.
Because you deserve the peace that comes from fully loving yourself.
Because you deserve to know the self-trust that comes from self-acceptance.
Because beauty is an essence, indescribable. An essence that is a part of our humanity
So go forth and allow yourself to learn the dance. The dance that takes you back and forth between arrogance and confidence. It is a really good dance, I promise.
Yours, forever in beauty
Ijeoma