Why you think you're ugly: MELISSA BUTLER

 

Melissa Butter is an American entrepreneur who founded the cosmetic brand The Lip Bar 

"I am a beauty disruptor" says Melissa Butler, beginning her TEDx Talk in Detroit. She claims she is fed up of linear beauty standards. As a black woman who has been shamed for her skin colour and her body shape, she has had a lot to overcome. She decided to take matters into her own hands and do as much as she can to challenge those beauty standards that excludes herself and plenty other women of all ages, races and sizes.

One day she overhead a man talk about all the physical attributes he thought she lacked, but she told herself that she was beautiful, and she learned a valuable lesson that day: to love herself wholly and to never allow someone else's opinion of her to determine her own value. She says she built her cosmetic company with the idea to change the way we think about beauty for ourselves and how we extend that to those who look different from us.

She first started making lipstick in her own kitchen, not because she was passionate about makeup, but because she was frustrated that "attractiveness was consistently looked at through a singular lens". She talks about how generally only fair-skinned, thin, young women are considered good looking, "as if good looks don't come in any other form". It causes us to look down on ourselves because "we feel as though we don't belong and that we don't deserve"; and we also extend these beliefs to everyone around us and in turn make them believe in it too. 

Later she points out that the global standard of beauty is becoming the western standard of beauty and how white people are still seen as the standard  when it comes to aesthetics even in Asia and Africa. 70 percent of women in Lagos, Nigeria bleach their skin even though skin bleaching has been linked to cancer. There has also been a rise in the amount of plastic surgeries in the recent years. While this issue may impact women more, men also are affected. For example, most of the male CEOs of those companies under the Fortune 500 ranking are taller than average as height is seen as an indicator of attractiveness and power. This is a multi-generational and gender-neutral issue. 

At the end of her speech, she challenges each of us to look at ourselves in the mirror; look at all of the greatness that we embody; accept and love it and finally try to extend that same love and acceptance to someone who doesn't look like us.

  

             

                          

Meenakshi Sivakumar

1st BA Sociology

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