Why Alicia Keys is going makeup-free on The Voice
Decision to do without cosmetics comes after years of fame and feeling insecure, musician says
Those of you who tuned in to NBC’s The Voice on Sunday night may have noticed something a little unusual: a celebrity, on network television, sans makeup.
Alicia Keys, one of this season’s coaches, no longer wears makeup, a decision she described publicly in May: “I don’t want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing.”
Keys’ bare, freckled face garnered some attention before Sunday’s preview of The Voice, Season 11.
She was photographed on the red carpet of the BET Awards in June, when about 7 million viewers tuned into the show, which also featured Keys performing.
But now an even bigger audience will regularly see Keys’ makeup-free face on the NBC series, which drew 13 million viewers last season.
Perhaps it’s fitting that Keys will be on a show premised on celebrity coaches choosing singers blindly so the decisions “are based solely on voice and not on looks.”
The process that led Keys to alter her public image came after years of fame and feeling insecure, as she wrote in Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter:
“I was finally uncovering just how much I censored myself, and it scared me. Who was I anyway? Did I even know HOW to be brutally honest anymore? Who I wanted to be?
“I didn’t know the answers exactly, but I desperately wanted to.”
The moment that led to her no-makeup revelation came when she arrived at a photo shoot for her new single, “In Common.”
She had just come from the gym and her face was “totally raw,” Keys wrote.
“As far as I was concerned, this was my quick run-to-the-shoot-so-I-can-get-ready look, not the actual photo-shoot look.”
The photographer told her, “I have to shoot you right now, like this! The music is raw and real and these photos have to be too!” Keys wrote.
At first unsure, the singer eventually relented.
“I swear it is the strongest, most empowered, most free and most honestly beautiful that I have ever felt,” she wrote.
Later, she appeared on the cover of Fault magazine, freckles and all.
For non-celebrity women, not wearing makeup can result in more than just criticism; it could affect a person’s salary, too.
There’s considerable research showing that attractive people tend to earn more, but a recent paper by University of Chicago and University of California at Irvine sociologists suggests that nearly all of the salary differences between women of varying attractiveness are because of grooming, such as wearing makeup and/ or styling hair.
For very famous women, who face intense scrutiny over their looks, going without makeup has been heralded by some as an act of bravery.
There have been female artists who have used makeup to make some sort of social or political statement.
Take singer Andra Day, who has taken to removing makeup midshow as a part of her act.
“I always felt more comfortable with a full face of makeup,” she said during a March show in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Times.
She continued wiping away her makeup, saying “as my face got cleaner, my relationships got cleaner.”
Mila Kunis appeared on the back cover of Glamour’s August issue without makeup, telling the magazine she felt fine about appearing that way.
“I don’t wear makeup. I don’t wash my hair every day. It’s not something that I associate with myself,” she said. “I commend women who wake up 30, 40 minutes early to put on eyeliner. I think it’s beautiful. I’m just not that person.
“So to go to a shoot and have my makeup artist put on face cream and send me off to do a photo, I was like, ‘Well, this makes life easy.’ ”
Interest in seeing what a famous person looks like below the layers of foundation, powder and concealer has been considerable for some time.
There’s a whole sub-genre of online photo galleries keeping track of makeup-free celebrity pictures, from candid shots to selfies.
Few famous women, though, have staked out such a definitive stance as Keys.
In the trailer ahead of The Voice season preview, Keys says, “You’re able to hear someone, true, for who they are. And that’s what music is.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that Keys will be on a show premised on celebrity coaches choosing singers blindly so the decisions “are based solely on voice and not on looks”