The Soul of a Black Woman

I can remember being younger and wishing I looked like all the models I saw in the magazines and on tv. I remember having subscriptions to Glamour, Vogue, and InStyle Magazines at a very young age. I was an aspiring model, and writer. As I got older I started to have a better understanding of the way the modeling industry worked and I knew I wasn’t small enough and I didn’t have the right figure to do it, so I would stare at those magazine pages and compare the models I saw to myself. I wanted a skinnier face, higher cheekbones, clearer skin, I wanted my shoulders to be smaller and my hips smaller and my stomach flatter. No matter how skinny I was, it wasn’t enough.

What prompted me to write this post?

I was browsing the Internet and I came across an article on the E! website accompanied with a video clip from The Anderson Cooper Show about this lady who called herself the Human Barbie. She has 2 daughters: a teenager, and a child under 10. Her teenage daughter is a dancer and is very self-conscious about sweating while performing, so instead of explaining to her daughter how the body works in terms of sweating she began taking her daughter to a dermatologist to get injected with Botox. Then she gave her youngest daughter (I think 6), a voucher for breast implants that she can redeem once she turns 18. The crowd and Anderson were both disgusted with her and he asked her to leave his show.

Girls tend to be the most vulnerable throughout our lifetime because we go through the most changes physically which in turn effect us emotionally and mentally. We are very impressionable when it comes to how we should view ourselves. We grow up with the ideas that skinny is good, we subscribe to magazines and fantasize about having the same shape and figure as the models gracing the pages, but in the back of our minds we look for reassurance that the way we look is perfectly fine and normal. If there’s no one there to assure us then we continue to reform and shape ourselves into what we think is perfect through eating disorders, psychological disorders, etc.

The pain of beauty is real and I don’t mean physically, but the mental pain and the emotional suffering not to mention the hurting we put on our finances by investing in all the latest products that claim to make us look younger, or slimmer, or more radiant.

There is no set definition for what beauty is. There is no guideline you have to follow to be considered beautiful, you just have to love yourself and appreciate the people who love you too.

Stay beautiful people.

XOXO Soulofablackwoman 💋