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.
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.