[Sometimes you’ve got to remind yourself] that people will come around.
How I look, how I dress, this is how I find my beauty, she explains.
“My mom, she just didn’t want me to be treated a certain way.
Courtesy The Glam Goth
Because for her its like, If you dress this way, everybodys going to look at you.'
And Im like, they were going to look anyway!
Oblitey is the real deal even when being interviewed via video chat.
Courtesy The Glam Goth
The same rose backdrop seen in her YouTube Get Ready With Me videos is present.
Her makeup and talon nails are applied and vampy.
Not a detail from these worlds are spared; the result is stunning and powered by her autonomy.
Courtesy The Glam Goth
That’s [how] goth, [has been identified since forever].”
But she hopes to challenge the ingrained expectation that these subcultures are inexplicably white-only.
She’s the daughter of African immigrants who grew up as a first-generation Black American.
Looking back, she acknowledges that she was kind of designed to be her parents' little princess.
“So I always thought I grew up alternative.
But I always loved rock n roll music, and even liked the Spice Girls.
I like to think it just started from birth.”
One of her earliest makeup memories was pleading for her mother to let her wear blush.
Her mother would oblige with just a tad of pigment here and there.
Then it was in middle school that Oblitey first gave grungy eyeliner a whirl.
Later on, after listening to Amy Winehouse, she gave the singer’s overblown wing a try.
“I did that and went to school looking crazy!
Ooooh, the kids let me have it that day,” Oblitey says, laughing.
“But I got through the day.”
Despite the heckling, she felt a calling for makeup and was eager to perfect makeup artistry going forward.
By the end of high school, Oblitey began to realize the underside of “perfecting” makeup.
The end result didn’t have to be so confined by society’s notion of what was beautiful.
Makeup instead could be an extension of feelings, ideas, and a conduit to self-care.
I think I have a unique beauty but I don’t feel pretty.
I’ll never be cute, small, dainty, and feminine in that way," she says.
It’s meant to make you feel good.
I don’t need to feel pretty.
I want to look like a painting."
But she still wouldn’t exactly call herself “goth.”
She didn’t realize that’s a term people would use to describe so many of her interests.
“Once I was dating someone in the goth scene, they were like ‘No, this is you.
It’s okay,'” she says.
She chose a new name: Glam Goth.
At least to the Black people outside of it.
Oblitey is aware of the gatekeeping concerns.
“My followers and supporters are like, We don’t care what you’re doing.
We want to see you doing stuff.’
[And it got me thinking how] it really is that simple,” says Oblitey.
“Especially for young, Black creators, women, and artists.
It’s just us living life and we don’t see that ever.
That’s what really motivates me.
What key in of life does she have?
Did she make it?'
There is no blueprint for a lot of young, Black people.
We don’t have this outline, this inheritance.”
“Let your self-expression be [a part of] what you want to say.
And now that I can, I want to verify that the younger generation knows it’s okay.”
Especially to the people that watch, support, and buy things from you.
Every Black creator deserves that."
It began when one of Oblitey’s freelance makeup clients wanted a glitter look.
She decided to make her own mix using Martha Stewart glitters and created a forest green hue.
She called itFrankenstein, and it became the prototype for the first Glitter Diamond of her eventual makeup line.
“Then I made a Snapchat video and was like, ‘Look what I made!'”
“And people were like, ‘Oh, where’d you get that?'”
Oblitey’s first launch cost her roughly $400 to create.
“I kept trying to find better ways, better packaging, and better outsourcing.”
It doesn’t look good on our skin.
It’s going to make me feel like a clown,'" she remembers.
And it would just break my heart.
So heartbreaking to hear that us as Black women feel like we can’t wear something.
I would always be like, ‘Baby, who told you that?’
you could wear whatever you want, it doesn’t matter!
It was almost like I was talking to myself.
So with Blood Rose, it was like, ‘I made this shade for you.’
“I feel like Black women need to see themselves as art.
I needed to see myself as the Mona Lisa.”
Black beauty was also the muse for Oblitey’s inclusive, neutral-based palette, which she callsThe Dark Renaissance.
She graces the packaging, posing as Leonardo Da Vinci’s most famous artwork.
“I feel like Black women need to see themselves as art.
I needed to see myself as the Mona Lisa,” she adds.
Running an independent beauty line is certainly a lot of work.
“For us as Black entrepreneurs, [our stuff] has to be exceptional,” Oblitey says.
“With us, we gotta make it stretch with pennies.
And as she discloses on YouTube, she still has days that are tough to get through.
But Oblitey is on her own time, living authentically goth and alternative.
Can I have a career?”
“I definitely think we’re demanding space,” Oblitey adds.
“I feel like just being Black in general, we carry this spirit.
But we’re not all the time.
We’ve had breakthroughs and also experience beautiful things.
Read more about Black creators in beauty:
And now, watch 100 years of goth beauty:
