Post by Liberian Girl on Jul 27, 2017 8:55:38 GMT
www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/madame-tussauds-whitewashing-beyonce-should-teach-us/
Like so many young girls in the western world, who grew up on a diet of Disney movies, teen magazines and TV shows with flawless heroines, I wanted to be just like the women I saw in the media. The beauty standards they promoted seeped into my consciousness to the point where I knew that it was a) important to be beautiful; b) beauty was predominantly white, or as close to that as you could get.
It's why - and I wince to write this - I always thought that Beyoncé was the best member of Destiny’s Child because she was the fairest. As a young Indian girl, I always desperately wanted to be paler, because to me, that meant being prettier.
The sad truth is: non-white girls, growing up in predominantly white countries, struggle. This ‘white beauty standard’ is so entrenched, that it's hard for anyone who doesn’t fit the mould to feel attractive.
All these feelings came rushing back to me this week, when I read about the new Beyoncé figurine at Madame Tussauds in New York. When images of the waxwork were released, there was widespread confusion.
It did not look like Beyoncé. It looked like a blonde, white woman.
Simply, the museum had whitewashed Beyoncé. Its wax makers had made the 35-year-old singer lighter-skinned. After a lot of anger on social media, they took the statue away and “adjusted the styling and lighting of her figure” to make her look more realistic - for which read, darker.
The museum told the BBC: "At Madame Tussauds, our talented team of sculptors take every effort to ensure we accurately colour match all of our wax figures to the celebrity being depicted. Lighting within the attraction combined with flash photography may distort and misrepresent the colour of our wax figures which is something our sculptors are unable to account for at the production stage."
Hopefully, the entire embarrassing fiasco was unintentional. But it does suggest that, on a subconscious level - whether to do with the way the statue was made or the manner in which it was displayed - lighter skin was viewed as a desirable quality.
In recent years, many companies and publishers have made conscious efforts to move away from this. Actress Lupita Nyong’o was named People’s Most Beautiful Woman in 2014, and shortly after, Lancome made her the first black woman to advertise the beauty brand.
But more often than not, the black and minority ethnic (BAME) women we recognise as 'beautiful' still fit western standards – from light-skinned black women like Beyoncé to Asian women with highlighted hair, and green-eyed Indian women such as Aishwarya Rai.
It is really no wonder that many women of colour, like me, grow up wishing our own skin was whiter.
Last year, Lil’ Kim, the hugely successful - and beautiful - rapper came under fire for seeming to post whitewashed images of herself on Instagram. Many were shocked that she would cave to pressure to appear whiter, and send out such a negative message to her followers. She was criticised for wanting to look like 'Barbie'.
But, to me, it made sense. In the past she has said that, when it came to her love life, “being a regular black girl wasn't good enough" and “All my life men have told me I wasn't pretty enough - even the men I was dating." Just because Lil’ Kim is famous doesn’t mean she is immune to the fact that society still sees fairer skin as prettier than dark.