Making Ourselves Blind
Complacency truly is the enemy of growth, and it’s incredibly relevant when talking about representation.
For so long I have fought myself, and the words of others, when it came to my conviction of the importance of representation in the beauty industry, So many times I was questioned, asked why I was “so unsatisfied” by “everything” or why I wasn’t fighting for “White representation in Asian societies” if I really “cared about everyone’s representation”. It sounds unbelievable but it’s true: when talking about my plans for writing these articles someone once replied “well what about White representation in Korean society and Asian brands? What about their representation?” To hear these kinds of responses was difficult. It was dumbfounding. It was unbelievable. It made me wonder if I was "allowed” to ask for more representation at all, if the sheer idea of talking about it to bring awareness was going to get shot down so quickly.
I also think that we have become complacent, conceding to the idea that “it is what it is” and that we can’t change it. Lack of Asian representation in the beauty industry has persisted for so long, it seems to be the stranger thing to imagine Asians occupying visible spaces in the beauty industry than it is to let ourselves be under-represented in an industry that we play a large part of fueling. CNN reports that Asians outspend other U.S. demographics in beauty products by 34%, and Asian beauty trends regularly sweep social media.
The danger of being complacent is that it leads to conformity. How many of us can truthfully say we’ve never wanted blonde hair, blue eyes, and Eurocentric features? I know I can’t. Only seeing a certain type of girl being praised as beautiful made me want to become like her. I’ve starved myself in chasing sharp cheekbones, and I’ve cried over the fact that I would never look like the girls in the magazines and on Tik Tok. Since I thought I would never be accepted and celebrated as I was, I figured the only solution was to change myself, abandoning all that makes me, well, me. With more representation, and a larger diversity of people and features celebrated, we can minimize the urge to conform and instead cultivate uniqueness and individuality.
