It started a few weeks before my 21st birthday. I got an email from my pen pal, Kim, in Minnesota, asking if I could receive an international package in my country Kenya. I lived in a village where doors were unmarked and dirt roads led to bushes. I had no address. But the vanity that defined me at that age needed that package so bad. It was the first time someone showed interest in celebrating my birthday.

I was working in a cyber café where the only payment was being allowed to use computers and send emails. When Kim wanted to send the package, I asked the owner of the cyber café if I could use his post office box address. After much prodding, he gave a begrudging yes, with a threat that if I used his address to receive illegal things, he would throw me to his snakes. (Yes, he kept huge snakes as pets, but that is a story for another day.)

It took exactly 22 days for my package to arrive from America. From the day she posted it, I scribbled my anticipation in a rugged old diary that acted as my dream board.

Nothing under this earth will ever replace the feeling I got when I finally held the yellow package that was delivered to me at the cyber café. I raced to the toilet, the only place that had semblance of privacy, and delicately tried to open my gift. I could feel my hands shaking from excitement that rose from a place deep inside me.

I made a hole in the envelope and peered inside. There were several multicolored bracelets, a photograph, and tiny samples of perfume. I could also see a sleek silver tube. I tore the envelope further and recognized the tube almost immediately. It was lipstick. My very first! I nudged it open, and it revealed a crimson red color that looked even richer when I moved from the toilet’s fluorescent light and held it against the scorching sun.

I made a swatch on my wrist. It glided smoothly to form a screaming red line. The color of my blood. It stood out like an act of defiance. I hastily rubbed it off; but I knew I was in love.

In my village, and according to my family, owning lipstick was unacceptable. The thought of wearing it was unimaginable. Women with scarlet pouts were something I had only seen in magazines. I marveled at the courage of those women, inwardly wondering if they had parents.

It glided smoothly to form a screaming red line. The color of my blood. It stood out like an act of defiance.
Click To Tweet

My childhood is made up of memories of my mother whispering to me about “red lipped prostitutes.” Of village girls who left for the city and got introduced to sex, drugs, and lipstick.

“She started coloring her lips and everyone knew she will get AIDS,” I remember my mother saying under muted light from the paraffin lamp that lit up our kitchen. She was retelling a story she had heard at the market, of a girl who was found dead a few months after she left the village to look for a job in Nairobi. They blamed her death on prostitution and lipstick.

As my mother spoke, tears gathered around her eyelashes. I wondered if she was crying from the pain of the story, or if her eyes were getting irritated by the smoke from the wet firewood she was using to cook. Lipstick was a sin. No decent woman wore it, at least in the eyes of my mother and people around her.

The night after receiving my package, I hid the lipstick beneath a heap of clothes in my metallic suitcase. I could not sleep. I wondered if I would ever get a chance to apply it. When everyone was asleep, I groped through the darkness, opened my suitcase and rummaged through it with my fingers. There it was! My lipstick.

I opened it again and lifted it to my nose — it smelled like delicious bubble gum. I applied it in the dark, smacked my lips together and extended my lips to see if it could shine through the pitch darkness around me. It did not. I rubbed it off till my lips were sore. Then I went to bed.

Applying lipstick in the dark became my ritual. Whenever fear that my mother would notice remnants of the representation of immorality lingering in the cracks of my lips crept inside me, I would wash my mouth with soap.

Oh, I longed for the day I would wear my lipstick in the light of day.

I decided to dare, almost six months after she sent it to me. I tried it because I was tired of hiding. I was just fed up with not being able to express myself because of what my culture made me believe. I was young, I wanted to be different, and lipstick provided that. So I created an awkward pout with my mouth and clumsily drew an unsteady red line on the outlines of my lips. While staring into the cracked mirror that I held close to my face, I filled my lips.

I tried it because I was tired of hiding. I was just fed up with not being able to express myself because of what my culture made me believe.
Click To Tweet

My heart was beating fast as I slowly pressed my lips together before applying another layer. The redness of my lips was a representation of rebellion and transformation for me. I stared at myself in the mirror, and fell in love with the contrast the red lips formed against my dark skin. The dark spots on my face and my bushy eyebrows seemed less pronounced from the dominance of the lipstick.

Then, I grabbed the hem of the leso (wrapper worn by women over their clothes to show decency) and slowly wiped it off. I had tasted liberation. I had worn lipstick during the day. It was brief, but it showed a defiance of rules that defined women. I was a part of a mini revolution.

My urge to do more was emboldened. Wearing lipstick became my distant and secret obsession.

The tiny silver bottle contained my freedom. Not being able to wear lipstick reminded me of my oppression. I wanted to do things that were forbidden, things women had been enculturated to believe they cannot and should not do. We were taught that women cannot serve and eat before men had their full share. I remember waiting for my father to finish eating, and it felt like forever. I would get so hungry waiting for men to eat. We were told we cannot laugh out loud, so all my life, I grew up stifling laughter because women were supposed to lower their voices. Looking at a man in the eye was considered rude; so I spent time staring on the ground while talking.

Any time I caressed the tube between my fingers, I was confronted with the reality of how much our culture had made women feel like they have no say in what they do with their bodies.

We were enchained. The only way I could break from those shackles was to wear my lipstick out.

One Saturday morning, almost six months after I received the lipstick, I did it. I wore faded blue jeans that I had gotten for 100 shillings (1 dollar) at a flea market, a white halter blouse, and lipstick. I was ready for the world.

My mama was working in the farm when I stepped out into the brightness of day, wearing red lipstick.

The world momentarily held its breath. As she saw me, she put down the seeds she was sowing, and walked towards me. I stood, waiting.

“What are you doing to me? What is that on your lips?” she asked. Tears choked her, and the more she talked, the more it became apparent that she was crying. Yes, the first time my mother saw me wearing lipstick, she cried.

“What will I tell people? Have you decided to be a prostitute?” she asked; her voice low and dejected. I stood motionless. She begged me to wipe it off.

I weakly told her that I will remove it when I come back. She watched me walk away with my lipstick still intact. I did not have courage to look back.

I felt so free. Lipstick to me was not a mere influence of the “Western world” or corrupt media. It was just me, being a young woman who wanted to try out something new without feeling like I owed the whole community an explanation.

She watched me walk away with my lipstick still intact. I did not have courage to look back.
Click To Tweet

I was tired of being told what to wear, what parts of chicken women should eat, how loud they should laugh and what should go on their lips.

I wanted to paint my lips, because they were mine.

I wore lipstick that day, and the days after. Even when my mother said she will miss me when I die, because to her, lipstick and death were related, I still wore it.

Amidst stares and whispers when I walked past people in the village, I maintained my red lips. In no time, the stares reduced. People started accepting my red lips. My streak of red on my lips became normal.

I had gotten my freedom, and they had accepted it. My mother no longer clicked when I tried getting lipstick stains off my teeth.

I started asking Kim to send me more lipstick. When she sent me coral lipstick, my mother lingered behind me as I tried it on.

“I used to think all lipsticks are red. What is that color?” she asked.

I said: “They are in all colors you can imagine.”

She shook her head and smiled. I had won the battle.

In a succinct and biting phrase, British-Iraqi freelance writer Ruqaya Izzidien dismisses Fenty Beauty’s recently launched Moroccan spice eyeshadow palette as nothing more than “shades of cheap Arab tokenism.” The palette features eyeshadows with names like “Sahara Stunna,” “Henna Sea,” and “Cumin Get it.” The advertising is no less hackneyed, deploying colored sands and women strutting around with a camel (of course there is a camel) to substantiate that the palette is, indeed, authentically Moroccan. And yet Moroccan creators and models are conspicuously absent from the campaign.

This oversight is to many, easily defensible. Moroccan culture is “spicy” and “exotic,” the kind  that would inspire beauty. What’s more, Fenty’s founder, Rihanna, is a Black woman, and Fenty has been an industry leader in providing makeup for people of every color. Surely, one would imagine, they must know what they’re doing when it comes to race and color.

The problem lies in regarding malicious intent as the only iteration of oppression. In the Moroccan Spice campaign, Fenty engages with a seemingly harmless yet disappointingly orientalist vision of Morocco. Even within WoC activist circles, there is a great deal of misperception about orientalism as a tool of oppression and subjugation. A term that refers to the lens through which the colonizing West perceives the the purported “East” as a faraway land of the strange and the exotic, it is often dismissed as nothing more than a fascination with the land of the “other.” Without engaging with the harmful history of orientalism, it is easy to mistake Fenty’s palette as a tribute to Moroccan women rather than an erasure of them.

But there is indeed a sinister history underpinning the celebration of the palette as an epithet for Moroccan spice markets. Since the advent of colonialism, the West has produced a veritable cornucopia of stock images of the East, ranging from evil Arabs to overflowing Bazaars to Harems with naked women lounging about for the pleasure of their male owners. These assert and reinforce the belief that the “orient” is a space removed from reality, primitive and uncivilized. Armed with this dehumanizing notion, the colonizers’ justified their “civilizing” mission (read: rampant exploitation and destruction).

Without engaging with the harmful history of orientalism, it is easy to mistake Fenty’s palette as a tribute to Moroccan women rather than an erasure of them.
Click To Tweet

Hiding behind clever puns and colorful advertising, Fenty’s palette builds off this agenda by distilling Morocco into a timeless land of deserts, Souks, and spices. With the puns come more visibly negative stereotypes—consider the eyeshadow named “Evil Genie.” Taken together, the names and the advertising produce a theater of Morocco that has no relationship to its reality. This is no simple matter of perception. Persistent orientalist othering of Arabs feeds into the kind of cultural xenophobia that licenses policies like the Muslim Ban and targeted surveillance programs.

Fenty does not appear to have consulted with Moroccan women to produce an accurate representation of the “flavors of Morocco,” but instead built purely from a convenient fantasy etched into the American consumer’s mind. That could have been an easy solution. The camels and Shisha references could have been retired. Yet the brand chose to exploit the same tired tropes that litter notions of the Arab world in the contemporary US. For a brand that purports itself to be inclusive and woke, this is a convenient oversight.

Yet this is an old story, fueled by the twin evils: commodification and ignorance. As diversity and multiculturalism continue to grab eyeballs (as evidenced by those ever-so-subtle university brochures featuring PoCs masking largely white campuses), it has become profitable to cater to women across the spectrum of ethnicity and race. This is not a bad thing. Fenty’s wide shade range and inclusive advertising have a welcome place in an industry plagued by racist narrowcasting. Yet their choices in the Moroccan Spice campaign reveal that the intent was more to profit off the tag of inclusivity than to work towards building it into their brand culture. Fenty’s palette brings an age-old orientalism into the world of late-capitalism by gratuitously commodifying and exoticizing an orient based in spectacle and fantasy to sell their product.

Persistent orientalist othering of Arabs feeds into the kind of cultural xenophobia that licenses policies like the Muslim Ban and targeted surveillance programs.
Click To Tweet

This commodification is particularly disappointing coming from a brand spearheaded by a contemporary black icon. Rihanna’s involvement in the palette and its marketing goes further in normalizing the narrative of orientalism even within the ranks of women of color. This is no new phenomenon. Different minority groups have a long history of being at odds with each other in the spheres of recognition and activism—just think of the fervor with which some feminist groups refuse allyship with LGBTQ activists or the ease with which oppressed minorities in the US choose to disavow immigrants. Empower American women it does, but Fenty has little concern for the sentiments of the women whose culture it warps and commodifies under the guise of diversity. This might be why there are no models of Moroccan origin in the campaign; as long as minorities within the American narrative are empowered, it simply doesn’t matter what happens to women on the outside.

Andrea Smith, scholar of indigenous studies, puts this apparent contradiction in a framework she introduces in her essay “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy.” Smith suggests that WoC politics in the US are inadequately framed: “[The current framework of WoC activism] tends to presume that our communities have been impacted by white supremacy in the same way. Consequently, we often assume that all of our communities will share similar strategies for liberation. In fact, however, our strategies often run into conflict.” Fenty and its purported inclusivity are a blatant manifestation of this phenomenon. While Rihanna might claim “Fenty Beauty was created for everyone: For women of all shades, personalities, attitudes, cultures, and races,” her inclusivity falls flat when it comes to involving the women whose culture is commodified in the process of creating and marketing a product catering to “all women” within the US.

Perhaps this is a reckoning. Perhaps instead of fighting for inclusion in an industry that has been built on the exclusion of minorities, a systematic dismantling needs to take place. Blanket empowerment  needs to be retired to give way to a more nuanced and effective activism, one that recognizes different manifestations of oppression, both within and without the US. The onus is as much on us as it is on the likes of Fenty. Want to experience Moroccan spices? Buy some from a Moroccan producer. Want to learn about beauty in Morocco? Follow Moroccan models and increase their audience. Want to use Moroccan beauty products? Support one of the many Moroccan cosmetic brands that actually involve Moroccan women in their production processes.

Dismantling the old-school orientalism that wafts unchecked through the American beauty industry (be it in K-beauty advertising or Fenty’s release) requires nothing more than a desire to engage with the cultures that “inspire” the products of brands like Fenty. It is not enough to champion brands that perform inclusivity, conflating women of color into one convenient package without recognizing the difference in their contexts and oppressions. We need to move beyond blanket narratives and demand real inclusivity from the beauty world and, indeed, from our own circles of activism. Without this, WoC spheres will remain superficially diverse, yet divided as ever.

By Chelsea Cristene

1997: The girls at school collect Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers. We line them up on one of our desks, form a circle, compare. The most basic come in standard fruit flavors like lime and watermelon. Some, like my frosty blue snowflake gloss from a holiday collection, are laden with sparkles. The rarest offer subtle tints of red for cherry or coffee brown for mocha.

We enjoy trading our Smackers and wearing them on keychains. We enjoy that they make our lips soft and smell like the felt-tip markers in art class.

My Christian friend who goes to a church where people cry out in a strange tongue is not allowed to play with them. But it’s clear, I protest, swiping a stick across the back of my hand. I snap open the heart-shaped latch to my plastic cosmetics case and point to my Tinkerbell set with the peel-off nail polish.

At the pool, my friend wears an oversized T-shirt so that no one will see her body. She sits cross-armed while I dab Tinkerbell cologne on my wrist, dreaming of when I will have a real glass perfume bottle with a fancy top like my mother’s.

Years later, I will wonder which one of us was oppressed.

***

1999: The neighbor girls’ mother is a Mary Kay consultant. We sneak into her trove of products and find the cardstock samples, each stamped with the signature rose. Deciding to revive the 1980s, I scamper home with a navy blue square of eyeshadow and sweep it across my lids. My mother opens the bathroom door and stifles a laugh. “Next year when you’re 13,” she says, slipping the sample out of my hands. “I’ll teach you.”

My friends next door aren’t allowed to wear “real” makeup either, but that doesn’t stop us from playing with the samples. We arrange them in meticulous spectral order. We read their names and imagine ourselves as women in Mary Kay’s creative department, trading ideas drawn from the shades of our lovers’ lips.

The older sister waves us upstairs to her bedroom vanity. She knows how, she says, from watching the other girls at school. But a finger slips. The cosmic hunter green powder meets her off-white carpet, and even in our frenzy to clean up, we have the feeling that something precious is lost in the fibers.

***

2005: I discover bareMinerals, a line of weightless and natural cosmetics. My skin feels healthy, thoroughly covered but not caked-upon as with some of the shinier and goopier brands. Here I am, I think, exploring the emerging contours of my face.

“You should wear less makeup,” my college boyfriend suggests. “Or no makeup. I feel like I can’t see you.”

I’m confused. My cosmetics are as much a part of me as my clothes, though he finds those objectionable too, depending on their cut and elasticity. “Who are these for?” he asks, his hand on the tight backside of my jeans. I am no longer the narrator of this scene, whose perspective now alternates between my incredulous partner and a series of real or imagined threats.

Unhappily, I keep my face bare on the weekends I visit him. Style is one of the central elements, like literature and music, firmly anchoring my gently-pliable identity. My act of quiet rebellion is hidden from him when I arrive to morning class powdered, mascaraed, and coiffed. Hoodies and flip flops never felt like me.

Realizing that my boyfriend is in love with a version of me that doesn’t exist, I say goodbye. But as I turn new corners, others continue to remove me from the narrative of my own body.

A crunchy granola lesbian in Queer Theory posits that I can’t be a feminist because I wear high heels and red lipstick — emblems of the patriarchy. Once I graduate and move back home, I arrive at the local bars with my face painted. Fingers lift my hem, dance across the stones of my necklace. “What are you all dressed up for? This place is a dive.”

I will learn that this is called “trying too hard.”

As more and more responsibilities fill the leisurely recesses of my life, there are also times when I prefer to appear in public without makeup. My presence at the grocery store is not an act of self-expression or integration into a scene. Still, when I bump into someone I know like this, they ask if I’m all right. They say I look tired.

I will learn that this is called “letting yourself go.”

2016: One sleepy Saturday morning, I stare into the bathroom mirror of our rented beach house. My skin is dewy after a quick wash in the sink. I could be featured in one of those “Your Favorite Celebrities Without Makeup” spreads, if I were anyone’s favorite celebrity. I slip on my bathing suit and greet my current boyfriend, never having wondered what he thinks about me with makeup or without.

I wiggle my toes into the Carolina sand and open Peggy Orenstein’s best-seller, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, an analysis of the princess-ification of American girls through the lenses of consumer culture and child psychology. My eyes dart back over a few borrowed lines from Susan J. Douglas’ Enlightened Sexism:

We can excel in school, play sports, go to college, aspire to — and get — jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so forth. But in exchange we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands, decorating, perfectly calibrated child-rearing, about pleasing men and being envied by other women.

It’s a contract I never signed. Fussing over trifles to hold our places in the old boys’ club, like Ariel exchanging her voice for legs. Culture shapes identity. Culture shapes behavior. But I cannot accept my glittering washes of rainbow dust all carefully selected, all having brought me a thrilling jolt upon their purchase, as mere patriarchal assimilation. I dig my hands around in the colors and transform. I imagine new ways of being in the world. I reject the insistence that a woman can’t choose what makes her feel beautiful without regard for the judgement of others.

One creates oneself, Grace Jones says.

Later that month, my mother’s face wavers as I emerge wearing a shade of plum-black lipstick, just one of my recent splurges among tubes of silver-grey, neon orange, sunny coral. When I was a compliant teenager leaning into her hands as they pressed liner to my eyes, showing me how to dramatically define their almond shape, I’m not sure she had this look in mind.

“That’s different,” she says.

That’s the idea. I join my best friend at the gay club and we twirl to the pulse, the colored lights dancing over our bodies.

***

This piece originally appeared on Role Reboot and is republished here with permission.

Lead image: flickr/xtina5645