'King Richard' star Aunjanue Ellis pens letter to daughters

Academy Award-nominee Aunjanue Ellis has written a letter to her daughters, whom she has lovingly called her bright, black future.

The letter was published on Variety, it reads: "A Letter to My Daughters Dear Exquisites:

So an errant fake lash led me to a Google search. This search led me to the L'Oreal Beauty Blog. Always looking for makeup wisdom, I glanced over their other articles and saw a piece called "How to Make Your Lips Smaller." The artwork for the piece featured a Black woman who looked like me.

"Lips like mine. Skin like mine. Body like mine. I looked at this woman -- my own reflection. I questioned my sight. I looked for the date thinking surely this article was a fossil from a more unenlightened time. Circa 1950. No. It was written and posted in 2021. Months ago. I sent the image to other Black women friends who were equally stunned. According to this article, my lips -- replete, ancestral, a remnant of my majestic mother -- were a thing to be made "small."

Now, right now! Black women's bodies, STILL, for all the veneration (often thinly masked appropriation), remain a place of conflict in American culture. More upsetting, they remain mere material, a commodity to be diminished, or erased at will. A thing that services.

The expression "Black Is Beautiful" feels anachronistic now. Cringey. Regressive. But when I saw this article, I am cannon-shot back to the need for this rallying cry. That, in 2022, "Black. Is. Beautiful" are still words we need to guard us against the blows of a beauty company, a beauty industry, that tell us our lips, our bodies' glad claim to African shores, are not only not beautiful, but undesirable, something to be erased like the lancing of a pimple.