I am truly inspired after seeing so much change at the Oscars this year – from Ellen’s great job hosting, to a hijabi presenting on stage, to Cate Blanchett’s inspiring speech about women in the film industry, to the brilliance of this Oscar winner Kenyan woman, Lupita Nyong’o, and her reminder to us on what beauty truly is:
“But around me the preference for light skin prevailed, to the beholders that I thought mattered I was still unbeautiful. And my mother again would say to me you can’t eat beauty, it doesn’t feed you and these words plagued and bothered me; I didn’t really understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be. And what my mother meant when she said you can’t eat beauty was that you can’t rely on how you look to sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion for yourself and for those around you…..And so I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey. That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside, that there is no shade in that beauty.”
Let’s challenge the unattainable standards of beauty that have been imposed upon us and create a better, kinder world to raise our daughters in.
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