Slay In Your Lane by Yomi Adegoke

Author:Yomi Adegoke [Yomi Adegoke & Elizabeth Uviebinené]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Fifty Shades of Beige

YOMI

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‘Black women aren’t ugly – they’re invisible.’

Mary Jane Paul, Being Mary Jane

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When I was a kid, I used to buy a magazine called Sabrina’s Secrets – a 90s tween mag based on the Sabrina the Teenage Witch series. In my Pentecostal Nigerian household it was contraband, featuring the forbidden trifecta: boys, witchcraft and makeup.

I loved that stupid magazine, with its cheap nail-art pens and ‘lipgloss’, which was pretty much just petroleum jelly with glitter glue mixed in. Every fortnight each issue came with a free hair or beauty gift that went into a super-camp, spangly, purple box that accompanied the inaugural edition. It was the perfect, cheesy pre-teen bible; backpage ‘Does your crush like you back?’ quizzes were my Psalms, aged ten.

That stupid magazine was probably my first ever experience of unrequited love.

Because while I loved that stupid magazine, it certainly didn’t love me back. To be honest, it didn’t even know that girls who looked like me existed. Week after week I’d solemnly put aside the freebies – butterfly clips that my hair would break, hair wax that sat atop my plaits like a sneeze – with the hope that next week something neutral would come through the post: ‘Yes! Clear mascara! Toe separators!’ But although nail files and aqua-coloured nail polish may have been colour-blind, I almost tore out the entire hair tutorial mid-section on a weekly basis.

You see, Becky with the good hair was my nemesis long before she was Beyoncé’s. Each week without fail a grinning blonde model, almost-definitely-probably called Becky, would use scrunchies and Kirby grips and crimpers to recreate whatever hairdo our Sabrina God ordained. But I, the most loyal of Sabrina’s subjects, couldn’t join in: my hair didn’t grow down, it grew out; it wasn’t long, it was wide. The French braids they did with such ease looked nothing like they were supposed to on me.

It was my first real realisation that black women were a fleeting afterthought when it came to beauty – if we were thought of at all. I have no idea why Sabrina’s sidelining surprised me, as her one black sidekick, Dreama, only lasted one season. I learned to live with it.

And I learned to live with it when I switched from Sabrina’s Secrets to Bliss magazine, and from that to Sugar. Along with snogging tips and the definition of toxic-shock syndrome, there’s one thing black girls quickly absorbed from teen magazines: the makeup freebies were not for us – not unless ‘dusty, ashen corpse’ was actually the look you were going for when applying foundation. After our first brush with a way-too-pink blusher and the inaugural spritz of a defrizz spray that only worked on certain types of ‘frizz’, we soon learned to stick to the middle-page perfume samples instead. Fast-forward a few years and, frankly, fuck all has changed.

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Nude is in – just not yours

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There are several coming-of-age milestones that mark a young girl’s life: starting your period, buying your first bra, and, for

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