All products featured on Allure are independently selected by our editors.
However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through links in this article.
It would soon become a personal charge: to be the most vocaladvocate of Black womenwithdeeper skin tones.
Illustration by Yazmin Butcher
Thirty years on, that reflex remains embedded in me.
In 2013, Yaba Blay, PhD, published her bookOne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race.
We wanted to heal us first.
I consideredKathleen Cleaverof the Black Panther Party, with that gorgeousbeauty markon her forehead.
In the next decade, the Black Power Movement saw massive demonstrations and mammoth intellects render searing speeches.
Hannah-Jones and Sage are the latest chapter in this long-held tradition of courageously speaking truth to power.
Because Ross and I would already be spending a lot of time in the limelight.
Still, I wanted to cast Hannah-Jones, one of the most celebrated Black women of our time.
“Blackness is as diverse as the very earth on which we stand.
The Black women of Gen Z are also using their words to liberate.
Consider Sage, a community-centered trans artist andactivist.
Her father is first-gen Afro-Cuban and her mother is white.
Like many trans women of color, her childhood was rife with trauma, displacement, and violence.
Nearly everywhere was a minefield: her school and her hood.
Her go-to makeup look is atinted moisturizer,concealer, and somecontouring.
“I want to be able to feel my beauty and to feel my femininity,” she said.
And you will likely never catch Sage without a set of fierceeyelashes: “Lashes became my favorite thing.
I understood them as kind of like my little armor going into the world.”
Like the land itself, Blackness in America is vast.
Decades later, representation across the skin spectrum is better.
But from my privileged perspective, the light still needs to shine brighter on the darker side of Black.
More from The Melanin Edit:
Now, watch Bel-Air star Coco Jones’s 10-minute beauty routine:
