by
Black Girl With Long Hair
You can tell when a magazine is featuring a black actress with her real hair. Usually it’s in a special issue dedicated to “real” (i.e. not thin and white) women, or it has a headline like, “Such-and-such actress gets real.” Basically the word “real” is thrown around a lot and it’s code for “we’re not really going to do this all the time because we have a eurocentric standard of beauty to uphold, but here’s this.”
One of the most annoying things about all this, to me, is the idea that you can’t do a high caliber beauty editorial without the use of significant hair alterations. And if you try, you have to use the word “real” to kind of lower expectations.
Kerry Washington is the covergirl for the November issue of Allure. The article is mostly about her transition away from her iconic role as Olivia Pope in Scandal (the show is in its last season) and her hair isn’t referenced until the fifth paragraph (and even then only in passing.)
Meanwhile several shots in the accompanying editorial are done with Washington’s real hair.
I’m here for the normalization of black hair.
7 Responses
The narrative is random and uninformative. The pic shows her hair in braids and somewhat disarray. I m sure she does not wear braids all the time
Wow! Beautiful! I DON’T they wear their REAL hair more OFTEN…they should.
Did they really have to let a good part of the front of her hair stick out? It’s not baby hair, just some awkward long strings… I guess it’s the ”real” look
natural beauty!
https://www.averahair.com/blogs/news/the-best-hair-color-trends-for-fall-2017
She looks beautiful. I love the hair, the styling, the makeup – it’s all wonderful! Just like we don’t often see black women’s natural hair in editorial spreads, we also don’t see a lot of this really soft, beautiful makeup. We’re always done up diva style, which is fine. But some of us don’t want the YouTube beauty tutorial as an everyday look.
those rope braids are soooo editorial! ….jk, she looks amazing <3
hmm