When Thin Lips Became Fashionable: A Study in Beauty, Power, and Erasure
There is a peculiar irony in watching white celebrities, many with naturally thin or barely-there lips purse, pout, and exaggerate their mouths for the camera. They draw attention to the very feature once used as a weapon to humiliate and dehumanize Black people. What was called “monkey-like” when it belonged to us has been renamed “plump,” “sexy,” and “youthful” when staged on them.
What was called monkey-like when it belonged to us has been renamed plump, sexy, and youthful when staged on them.
This is not just a harmless trend. It is the cultural loop of appropriation, erasure, and profit repeating itself.
From Dehumanization to Rebranding
For centuries, full lips were depicted in racist caricatures to mark Blackness as grotesque, primitive, or less than human. Colonial pseudoscience codified our bodies into categories of inferiority, with lips so visible and expressive cast as evidence of savagery. White women with thin lips were framed as refined, delicate, and “civilized.”
Now, the script has flipped. Cosmetic surgeons, makeup companies, and influencers sell the promise of fuller lips through injections, glosses, camouflage makeup tricks, and “lip flips.” The very feature once mocked has been commodified, but only after being stripped of its Blackness.
Who Gets Permission?
When a white celebrity puckers their lips for Instagram, it’s seen as playful and fashionable. When a Black woman wears her natural fullness, it’s coded as unprofessional, angry, or hypersexual. That double standard is not about lips. It’s about power: who gets to define beauty, who gets to monetize it, and who gets punished for having it naturally.
The Billion-Dollar Market of Imitation
The obsession with fuller lips has grown into a billion-dollar global market. White bodies are framed as the safe testing ground for features long criminalized on ours. This is how extraction works: our natural inheritance is devalued until someone else can repackage it for profit.
The Deeper Violence
What makes this trend most violent is not just the hypocrisy, it’s the silence. Rarely do the industries or the celebrities acknowledge the history. Rarely do they admit that these same lips were once mocked, spat on, or caricatured. Instead, the past is erased, and the new “trend” is credited to the very people who used to ridicule it.
The insult becomes the aspiration, so long as it is worn on anyone else’s head but ours.
The insult becomes the aspiration, so long as it is worn on anyone else’s head but ours.
Our Lips, Their Fetish, Our Refusal
Black lips are not trends. They are not pouts for sale. They are archives holding memory, resistance, and inheritance. Every smile, every kiss, every word spoken from them is an act of reclamation. While others contort themselves to mimic what we were shamed for, we must continue to honor that what was once ridiculed is, and always has been, beautiful.
Black lips are not trends. They are archives: holding memory, resistance, and inheritance.
For generations, Black women were told our lips were too large, too vulgar, too animal to belong in a world that prized pale smoothness as beauty’s ultimate truth. They called us monkeys, erased us from billboards, punished us in schools and workplaces for the very features they now purchase, inject, and parade as fashion. Today, I watch white celebrities with paper-thin mouths purse their lips into exaggerated pouts, selling an aesthetic once used to humiliate us. They don’t call it “Black lips.” They call it “trend,” “self-expression,” “a look.” That is the violence of erasure: when the wound is forgotten, but the scar is borrowed for profit.
When They Took Our Melanin Too
What’s next, our melanin? Wait, they already have. Spray tans, bronzers, tanning salons, “self-tan drops.” The billion-dollar beauty industry bottles what we are born with and sells it in shades of “mocha” and “bronze,” never calling it what it is: the replication of Blackness without the burden of being Black. Melanin, once treated as a curse, is now treated as a seasonal filter. Wear it for summer. Wash it off at night. But never live inside it.
And across the globe, the cycle repeats. In China, a trend is rising perms designed to mimic tightly coiled, Afro-textured hair. The same hair that has been dubbed “nappy,” “kinky,” or in Milady’s textbook, with audacious cruelty, abnormal cells. The insult becomes the aspiration, so long as it is worn on anyone else’s head but ours.
Selling Low Self-Esteem as Confidence: The Trend That Doesn’t Seem to Be Going Away Anytime Soon
The beauty industry has perfected the art of turning insecurity into currency. What they sell is not confidence. What they sell is the promise that if you inject, bleach, filter, or reshape yourself enough, maybe you will finally be worthy. They rename shame as empowerment. They rename dependency as freedom. And the shocker? They have the audacity to call this natural beauty.
When a white celebrity plumps her lips, tans her skin, perms her hair, or carves her hips, it is labeled as confidence. When a Black woman simply exists in her natural beauty: full lips, rich melanin, coiled hair, curves, she is labeled unprofessional, unkempt, or too much. The contradiction is not new, but the packaging has become more sophisticated. They are not selling products. They are selling low self-esteem disguised as self-expression.
And we, the descendants of those whose features were mocked, pathologized, and punished, are forced to watch the same cycle of erasure. And the most bitter truth? So many of us are more than happy to participate in it: our inheritance renamed as their innovation.
The Core Contradiction
How do racists and bigots reconcile hating us so deeply while using capitalism to extract everything from us?
They don’t. They exploit the tension.
Hatred keeps us on the margins.
Extraction turns our inheritance into their profit.
We are punished for the very things they are rewarded for copying. Our features, textures, and tones are positioned as both too much and not enough. Too Black to be respected, but Black enough to be repackaged and resold.
The System of Extraction
Skin: Melanin is policed in workplaces, excluded in sunscreen ads, yet commodified in bronzers and tanning booths.
Hair: Coils are punished as “unprofessional” in schools and jobs yet imitated abroad as daring and fashionable.
Lips: Mocked as grotesque in Black women yet surgically inflated in white women to be called youthful and sexy.
Bodies: Our hips and curves were ridiculed as excessive, now marketed as “slim-thick” when sculpted onto white influencers.
This is not admiration. It is not tribute. It is theft without acknowledgment. Performance without history. Consumption without consequence.
Wear melanin for summer. Wash it off at night. But never live inside it.
Our Refusal
This is why I refuse to use words like textured skin during skin analysis, as though the natural existence of pores is pathology. I refuse to call melanin-rich skin “normal” or “abnormal” according to Eurocentric charts. These words were not written for us, and they do not serve us. Enlarged pores are not deformities, uneven tones are not disfigurements, scars are not shame.
Enlarged pores are not deformities, uneven tones are not disfigurements, scars are not shame.
Our melanin is a warrior, and no warrior ever emerges from battle without a scar. Smooth skin is not the only kind of beautiful. It is not the only kind of worthy. To center our skin as it is scarred, marked, layered with memory is to declare: we are not mistakes to be corrected by someone else’s standard.
Beautélanin’s philosophy is not about disguising the evidence of our survival. It is about teaching that survival is beauty. Our features are not accidents, they are inheritance. Where others pathologize, we honor. Where others erase, we restore. Where others steal, we remember.
Beautélanin’s philosophy is not about disguising the evidence of our survival. It is about teaching that survival is beauty.
We are not their trend. We are the blueprint.
