“Back to the same ol’ same ol’,” critics decry. Carol’s Daughter apparently subscribes to the same antiquated criteria for beauty that whites and, tragically, some blacks have done throughout the annals of American history, so says vocal detractors of her new campaign to “redefine the color of beauty.”
In her apparent lust for marketplace expansion and make her products more palatable to mainstream appetites, some say Carol’s Daughter chose three light-skinned spokespersons to unveil to the country: singers Solange Knowles and Cassie and model Selita Ebanks.
Conspicuously absent from the campaign are any mahogany-hued or deep chocolate-coated women, despite the accessibility to a large pool of prospective candidates from which to choose, such as Angela Bassett, Gabrielle Union, Kelly Rowland and Keshia Knight Pulliam, just for starters. There aren’t even any representatives from the skin tone of one of Carol’s Daughter’s major backers, Mary J. Blige, represented.
Ebanks says the services of these light-skinned models were procured because of the texture of their hair as opposed to the hue of their skin:
“Carol’s Daughter doesn’t have just one direct demographic,” she said. “Solange’s hair is a different texture than mine; so is Cas
sie’s. Our skin and body types are different. Today, people are blended, and I think the three of us are a prime example. Women in my family range from vanilla to the deepest chocolate.”
“Deepest chocolate” women, however, are resigned to the same place they are in the vast majority of rap videos and model runways: off camera. Even one of the Carol’s beauty business partners, Steve Stoute, who sports a dark-brown complexion, is a proponent of beauty being “colorless.”
“They will serve as cultural ambassadors in bringing forth this acceptance that the definition of beauty is now colorless,” Stoute brags. “There are no longer boxes of white, black, Latina, Asian. More and more women are checking the ‘Other’ box.” According to Stoute, the trio was chosen because, aside from their beauty, “they share the vision and embody the messaging in their attitude, appearance, projects and core values.”
Interesting rationalization, particularly that last sentence, which uses “colorless” as an interchangeable word for the gag-inducing “post-racial society” phrase that was so fervently shoved down black America’s collective esophagus by conservatives when Barack Obama won the White House.
As millions of African Americans have done for decades, the Carol’s Daughter campaign eagerly illuminates their other ethnic attributes: Cassie, as is stated in the campaign, is of black and Filipina descent; Ebanks, who has Jamaican, Irish, Indian and African heritage, grew up in the Cayman Islands; and Knowles is of African American and French Creole descent.
For some who observe this new campaign, it is “the same ol’ same ol.”
–terry shropshire
