Editor’s Note: The Beautélanin™ Journal
This is not a beauty blog.
It is a remembering.
Of skin as lineage, of care as rebellion, of healing as inheritance.
Here, melanin is not corrected; it is consulted.
We study the language of the epidermis,
the politics written between pores,
the chemistry of survival.
Every essay, every critique, every ritual recorded here
is a pulse; a testimony that Black skin has always known how to restore itself.
When Thin Lips Became Fashionable: A Study in Beauty, Power, and Erasure
When Thin Lips Became Fashionable: A Study in Beauty, Power, and Erasure
When thin lips became a global trend, it exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of beauty culture. What was once mocked, criminalized, and pathologized on Black women: full lips, textured hair, melanin-rich skin is now repackaged as fashionable when adopted by white celebrities and sold back to the world through billion-dollar industries. From lip injections to tanning salons to perms that imitate tightly coiled textures, capitalism thrives on erasure: it extracts from Blackness, renames it as “self-expression,” and profits, while those who inherit these features naturally continue to face punishment and stigma.
This blog from Beautélanin Skincare calls out the cycle of appropriation, erasure, and profit, while reclaiming what is ours. We refuse to use Eurocentric language in skin analysis, such as “textured skin” or “normal skin,” because our skin does not exist to be measured against their charts. Enlarged pores are not defects. Uneven tone is not disfigurement. Scars are not shame. Our melanin is a warrior, and no warrior emerges from battle without scars.
At Beautélanin, our philosophy is clear: survival is beauty. We honor what has been pathologized. We restore what has been erased. We teach that what the beauty industry calls flaws are actually living archives: signs of resilience, inheritance, and legacy. While others sell low self-esteem as confidence, we center Blackness, truth, and dignity as the real standard. Because what the world calls a trend, we call inheritance.
White Faces at the Top, Black Faces in the Ads: A Skin Script Critique
This editorial critique exposes how Skin Script uses Black estheticians’ images for diversity optics while keeping ownership and decision-making in white hands. From marketing reels to Instagram smiles, representation is reduced to sales labor, not power. Drawing parallels from the author’s lived experience in the Bahamas and her own journey as a 14-year attorney turned esthetician, this essay unpacks tokenism in the skincare industry and calls for building true Black ownership in beauty.
Stolen Touch, Stolen Steam: From Ling to Milady, How Our Healing Was Laundered Through Whiteness
Stolen Touch, Stolen Steam
In esthetics school, they told me to research and discuss Per Henrik Ling who has been dubbed as the “father of Swedish gymnastics.” But I have never been the kind of woman to swallow what’s fed to me without questioning. I dug. I kept digging. And what I uncovered was this: everything I’m paying over ten thousand dollars to learn through the sanitized lens of whiteness: the strokes, the steam, the facials, the science, was stolen. Not borrowed. Stolen.
Our Haitian grandmothers made women sit over buckets of steaming fèy zoranj to heal wombs. Our elders reset bones without ever stepping foot in a lab. Our ancestors rubbed swollen muscles with cleren “moonshine” and herbs, and the colonizers watched, recorded, and carried it back to Europe. By the time Ling passed through France in 1800, just after the Haitian Revolution, the knowledge of Black hands had already been stripped of its names, folded into “hydrotherapy” and “hygiene,” and handed to him ready to rebrand.
From Ling to Mezger, from Switzerland’s spas to Milady’s textbooks, the chain is clear: take it from us, erase our fingerprints, rename it in French, sell it back to us with interest. They will credit China for acupuncture. They will credit India for Ayurveda. But they will not admit that Haiti, Africa, and Indigenous America are the foundation of the very esthetics industry we’re forced to buy into today.
This is why I write. Because if we don’t put our truths on the record, whiteness will keep laundering our culture into “science.” And they will always erase us in the process.