ALICIA KEYS BARES HER FRECKLED FACED ON TV
She made a decision to stop hiding who she is behind her make-up mask, writes ELAHE IZADI
SINGER Alicia Keys no longer wears make-up – even on TV as a judge in season 11 of The Voice.
She described this decision 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.”
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 any more? Who I wanted to be?
“I didn’t know the answers exactly, but I desperately wanted to.
“In one song I wrote, called When a Girl Can’t Be Herself, it says, “In the morning from the minute that I wake up / What if I don’t want to put on all that make-up / Who says I must conceal what I’m made of / Maybe all this Maybelline is covering my self-esteem.
“No disrespect to Maybelline, the word just worked after the maybe. But the truth is I was really starting to feel like that – that, as I am, I was not good enough for the world to see.
“This started manifesting on many levels, and it was not healthy.
“Every time I left the house, I would be worried if I didn’t put on make-up: What if someone wanted a picture?? What if they POSTED it??? These were the insecure, superficial, but honest thoughts I was thinking. And all of it, one way or another, was based too much on what other people thought of me.
“I found my way to meditation and I started focusing on clarity and a deeper knowing of myself. I focused on cultivating strength and conviction and put a practice in place to learn more about the real me.”
But the moment that led to her no-make-up 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-soI-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
PURE BEAUTY: Alicia Keys in all her glory without make-up to hide behind.
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 about the experience and resulting images.
Later, she appeared on the cover of Fault magazine, freckles and all.
For us non-celebrity women, not wearing make-up can result in more than just criticism – it could affect a person’s salary, too. There is considerable research showing that attractive people tend to earn more, but in a recent paper by University of Chicago and University of California, Irvine, sociologists suggest nearly all the salary differences between women of varying attractiveness is because of grooming, such as wearing makeup and/or styling hair.
However, there have been female artists who have used make-up to make a social or political statement. Singer Andra Day has taken to removing make-up mid-show as a part of her act.
Mila Kunis appeared on the back cover of Glamour’s August issue without make-up, telling the magazine she felt fine about appearing that way.
“I don’t wear make-up. I don’t wash my hair every day. It’s not something I associate with myself.”
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 subgenre of online photo galleries keeping track of make-up free celebrity pictures, from candid shots to selfies.
Every now and then, we’ll see a celebrity post a #nomakeup selfie to social media, and not necessarily connected to any kind of particular message. Even the ever-made up Kim Kardashian does it from time to time.
Few famous women, though, have staked out such a definitive stance as Keys. – The Washington Post