Every wednesday night my roommate and I gather round the tube and watch the one show we insist on watching live, rather than having TiVo do the work: Project Runway. I admit, it's highly entertaing and Heidi Klum's accent Auf's me. Recently, we've noticed a "How To" ad repeatedly broadcast during the show. It concerns a Tresseme make-up artist applying foundation to a light-skinned black woman, or as I would call her, Caramel colored. Now my roommate brought up a very interesting question in the form of a joke. As the make-up artist instructs viewers to place a lighter concealer on before applying the foundation, my roommate responds "now why can't she go darker? Everything is always about light, light, light."
Now forget about what you know about applying foundation and concealer (don't ask me how I know this, but I do) but I felt he made a good social commentary within his witty candor. Last night he ventured further, saying how the media depicts light-skinned black women as more beautiful than their darker skinned counterparts. He used Beyonce Knowles, Halle Berry and the caramel colored model used in the ad as his examples. Naturally, being the house dissenter, I chimmed in that some of the most beautiful black women are darker in complexion, for example, Iman, Naomi Campbell, Alek Wek, C.C Pounder and Whoopi Goldberg (YES, I love Whoopi). Akward silence followed for the rest of the evening and today I found myself thinking, perhaps my roommate is right in saying that dark complexioned black women are not viewed to be as beautiful as lighter ones. Now, I am at a disadvantage in that I am not black nor am I a woman, but I had to admit, I see his point. I mean look at the women I used as my examples, three of the five are supermodels, and the other two are just my personal favorites but not typically viewed as beautiful women by the media.
So really, is caramel the new black?
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9 comments:
And, is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Or is it dictated by the media?
No, Lazy is the new black.
Such a good observation. I find my perceptions following this new trend as well. For example, when I see Beyonce without her usual straightened, blonde hair I think...uh she needs to get rid of that curly brown mop. I don't know why but it seems that a lot of ethnic women a shown this way in the media. I think of J.Lo and the Evas (Longoria/Mendez) and they always appear beautifully tan but blonde. I am guilty of thinking they look better this way but I think I have been brainwashed by Loreal commercials.
Your observatoin is true. I personally do think that lighter skinned black women are more beautiful but that's just a personal opinion.
I would just like to add that Project Runway is one of my favorite shows. I was without Bravo at home and had to resort to downloading torrents. Now, even here at SJ, my suite is without a television and I have to survive off of recaps.
Also, you forgot Oprah.
why u gotta erase me.... it burns j5
i am clear i have excercised the demons....
i see u have too
I guess it is personal opinion. But in Westernized societies, lighter skinned Black women are more accepted as beautiful because they are closer to the Western image of beauty: fair skin, blue eyes, blonde hair.
Beauty is definitely determined by cultural norms/tastes, except in the case of the super enlightened folks who can actually look in someone's face and see that a person's features are pretty. (I'm capable of doing this because I used to draw portraits, so I'm able to discern whether someone's facial composition is ACTUALLY attractive and not just made up of a jumble of culturally preferred aesthetic markers.) In the high fashion world, at least, conventional=boring. Take it from me, a dark-complexioned black woman in a family of mostly light-complexioned people who has been raped six times by black men (light and dark-skinned) who admittedly violated me because they felt I didn't know my societal place, because I take care of myself as if I have something worth preserving. (Not that I'm bitter or anything, lol.) I've also found myself in numerous circumstances with light-complexioned black women (and white women, as well) who have bid me to be their flunky, or have questioned the compliment paid to me by a black man at a bar, or asked me to determine between the two of them which one was "high yellow" and which one "red bone" (Yes, this actually happened, and I didn't even know what "red bone" meant), or presumed I would be envious of their long hair, even though I have long, thick hair that I hardly know what to do with my darn self and always have!! The problem is that there is a cluster of associations that surround darkness, and so when people look at a dark-complexioned black woman (a person who is in herself an oddity because of her supposed oxymoronic identity, i.e. black+woman=not feminine), they see a misfit, an undesirable, non-woman, and all of those maligned associations surrounding darkness/blackness. Yep, folks, sad but true. It's just human nature to see identity before personhood and to care about reputation. And no man's going to put his reputation in jeapardy by dating someone who doesn't where the face exalted by cultural tastes.
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