Lupita's Message

          Before accepting the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Lupita Nyong’o received an award of a slightly different nature. She won the award for Best Breakthrough Performance at the seventh annual Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon, hosted by Essence Magazine. In her acceptance speech, Nyong’o spent little time talking about her part in the making of Twelve Years a Slave. Instead, she chose to take this moment to speak about how important a positive personal body image is to every girl and woman. And how over the course of her life, self-hate transformed into self-love.

           

            Nyong’o began her speech with a letter she had received from a young girl stating, “I think you are really lucky to be this black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me.” Her response to this letter was very surprising, coming from a celebrated fashion icon and a rising young star. Nyong’o said, “I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful… my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter skinned.” Nyong’o revealed that like many girls, her love for herself only ran skin deep.

            While most of her speech was dedicated to looking for inner beauty, this letter and Nyong’o’s childhood wishes raise a different point. Movies and popular media place their focus on women with lighter skin. They are considered to be more beautiful and more desirable. These ideals of beauty can be seen in something as small as a band-aid, or something as large as a cosmetic line. Flesh toned band aids are beige, even though that is not the only skin color that exists. On people who are not white, band-aids, which are supposed to be discrete become very obvious. In the make-up industry, major brands like Maybelline and Covergirl have a large range of make-ups that come in tones like buff-beige, and classic ivory; names that refer to lighter skin. There are often only minimal opportunities to find darker colors. Looking at the cosmetic section in stores and online at places like Target and Walmart show that even the brands targeted towards women of color have a similar standard when it comes to light and dark skin. There are significantly more choices in lighter shades than there are in darker. Although it may have been unintentional this lack of range and color helps promote the idea that even African American women with lighter skin are considered to be more beautiful.

            Lupita Nyong’o was right when she quoted her mother; “you can’t eat beauty. It doesn’t feed you.”  Your worth should not rest on your exterior, although it often does. It is hard enough for any young girl to feel truly beautiful. Which is why it is not fair for movies and the media to dictate how someone feels about the color of their own skin. It is impossible to feel beautiful on the inside when you do not love yourself on the outside. For this reason, I believe people like Nyong’o should speak up so that more girls and young women of any color “will feel validation of [their] external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. [Because] There is no shade to that beauty.”