A Note from the Leads: Melodie Holiday

A NOTE FROM THE LEADS.

I remember when I was young I heard the term “fair skinned” being used. I can’t remember exactly how old I was. I think that I had just really started to process racism and that was hard enough. This, however, was something else entirely because this was being spoken about by a black person regarding another black person. As if things weren’t bad enough there were more categories! I looked at my arms in contrast and took a long hard look at my face examining my skin tone and wondered where I fit. I eventually decided that unlike my sister who had a yellow tone to her skin my skin had shades of red and I also caught the sun which gave my skin a lovely coppery tone. Back then I don’t think I saw it as lovely because growing up so many things reinforced colorism. Take for example make up when I was growing up there were no makeup brands specifically for people of colour. The choices within the small town where I was living were zero so the red brown tones in my cheeks were flattened to a brown ashy grey pallor for many years until I moved to the city whereupon over the years a few brands came onto the market. I remember the very first time I tried a face powder which was my exact hue and I was overjoyed. I felt liberated and was very grateful to the brand that had taken the time to think of me, it made me feel very included in the world of beauty. Such a small and trivial thing and yet it has a massive impact.

Now I have access to a wealth of beautiful shades from quite a few different brands that seem to celebrate women of a variety of hues. So why on earth would someone use harmful skin lightening products?

When casting aspersions I need to think back to my own behaviour years ago. Surely it would have been easier to wear no makeup than makeup that was not a great match for my skin tone. But I didn’t, I searched for my own sense of beauty while also being bombarded with representations of the beauty ideal. This was largely from a Eurocentric perspective because I relied very much on a single news agent to purchase a copy of a black hair care and beauty magazine which came into publication around the time of my late teens! I personally find the idea of skin lightening products offensive because not only are they harmful, but whoever produces them must have made the mistaken assumption that I and others like me, would want to be another colour! However, I do not condemn the people that use them because I know how much pressure there is in society to conform to dominant ideologies surrounding beauty. I see skin lightening products as a survival tool which people use to navigate a society which perpetually reinforces the concept that it only values one type of beauty.

“If you’re black, stay back; If you’re brown, stick around; If you’re yellow, you’re mellow; If you’re white, you’re all right.”

Unknown- Melodie Holiday