beauty music: dead prez - the beauty within

Dead Prez "The Beauty Within" from kinetikcinematix on Vimeo.

The World's Smallest Esthetician

photo: pr newswire

Okay, 21st century beauties, here we go:

FROM PR NEWSWIRE:

The World's Smallest Esthetician

BOULDER, Colo., April 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Office appointments are so 20th Century. MyChelle Dermaceuticals is revolutionizing skin care with the introduction of a breakthrough technology that provides access to an esthetician anytime, anywhere. 

Anyone with an iPhone 4®, iChat® or Skype can now download a free app from iTunes and schedule an appointment for a 30-minute consultation with one of MyChelle Dermaceuticals' licensed estheticians between 9:00am and 5:00pm MDT Monday through Friday.  The direct, interactive link is an unrivaled source to skin enthusiasts anywhere in the world.

Read the entire article here

beyonce for the 'chirren-let's move flash workout campaign

Okay, okay, it's not just for the kids ... Let's all get in better shape, shall we?

alisha, a short film about body image

Alisha is a short film I recently came across on Clutch.  Written and directed by 17-year old filmmaker Daniel Citron, the award winning film is the story of an overweight  teenage girl struggling with body image issues while also trying to maintain a relationship with her abusive father.  It doesn't go down easy, but it is a necessary and well done piece of work.  Check it out:


Alisha from Daniel Citron on Vimeo.

hairstory: pitstops on the road to the glorious coil

Even though it’s completely opposite to my natural texture, straight hair is where my story begins. In childhood memories around hair, first came the hot comb, and then later, the no-lye relaxer. There were times when I wore my hair in African braids, beautiful intricate styles that lasted for months at a time. Even so, soon after the braids would come out, in would go the relaxer. The idea that hair needed to be straightened was such a given, it was like a fundamental part of the way I was wired. I was born into that world, knew nothing else, and didn’t find my way to questioning any of it until decades later.

When I first started experimenting with changing my hairstyle, my ideas were variations on it in its relaxed state. Like the period in high school when I decided I didn’t want my hair tightly curled with a hot iron and stacked into an impossible looking asymmetrical sculpture (It was the eighties). I stopped curling my hair. I would part it on the side, and let it fall, which I will admit, in retrospect, left it looking more like an interruption on the way to a hairstyle than an actual hairstyle.

Another phase in my hairstory was the summer of the weave, in the middle of college. The only evidence I have of that now is a set of photo negatives, and the vague memory of how quickly the excitement of having that new hairstyle faded. Once I got the weave, and lived with it for a bit, I didn’t get it anymore. The maintenance was too involved for my taste and I had answered my wonder about what it would feel like. It felt exactly like what it was: someone else’s hair sewn in strips to mine. Not for me. Now when I see those negatives, I can’t help but laugh and think, Damn it looks like I was trying to give Chaka Khan a run for her money on the hair tip.

In my 20s I got curious and courageous enough to cut all my hair off. By that point I had done all I was going to with a relaxer, and I started to notice Black girls with amazing natural hairstyles. I wanted to experience the ease of a wash and go style. At the same time, I was becoming more aware of societal beauty norms, how little they coincided with how I felt and thought, and how automatically, often frantically, people subscribed to them. It all seemed a tad on the bizarre side to me because my hair changes felt in a sense like I was trying on selves for fit. And when the fit wasn’t right, I didn’t linger.

Nowadays, I wear my hair in long dreadlocks and I absolutely love it. I love my hair in its natural, coarse, texture. I love the myriad styling options available to me. I love the strength of it, the coil of it, and yes, the feel of it. I know I’m not supposed to, if I want to fit in with my land-of-the-free society. Every day, several times a day, I encounter billboards and all kinds of ads that basically say, as if it’s a given fact, that what my hair does naturally is not what hair is supposed to do, not what I should want it to do. I get the message. I just disagree. Highly.

It wasn’t some mystical, magical, beyond-us force that came down and decided that a European beauty ideal would be the law. Those kinds of ideas came out of human minds, like mine. Like yours. Like the ones it will take to eventually get mainstream media to reflect our society’s beauty in its gloriously diverse actuality. Once I got conscious of this, it became impossible for me to blindly ingest beauty ideals served up by mainstream media, or anyone else.