If you haven’t been recently embroiled in Instagram beauty tutorials like I’ve been, you may have missed some of the more eye-opening beauty trends of the last few months. Basically, here’s what you missed: people are using knives to contour, apparently everyone has seven-inch-long eyelashes, and people are putting fake freckles all over their faces.
Now, I’ve been blessed with a ton of natural freckles, and while I love them now, I didn’t always. So, it confuses me why people would willfully do something to look like what I’ve been trying to hide for over a decade.
Whole companies have been devoted to this trend, companies like Faux Freckles TM, etc. Now objectively I can look at the faux freckle beauty trend as cute and slightly reminiscent of the “Pippi Longstocking” aesthetic.
But frankly, the first time I saw it, it rubbed me the wrong way. My philosophy has always been that makeup is, after all, just makeup, and any form of self-expression that makes a person feel more comfortable in their skin, is, in my mind, a great thing. However, I can’t help but feel that twang of bitterness seep in every time I see a clear faced girl dot her cheeks with brown eyeshadow. After talking to similar freckle-having friends of mine, the consensus was seemingly a collective “ugh, why?”
VP of our HC chapter, Madi Driscoll, however, put this feeling of disgust into perspective for me. If I have a problem with someone drawing on something that I’ve been told is a “flaw” in my appearance and making it into some kind of globalized trend, then how must people of color feel when they see aspects of their own beauty culture copied and capitalized upon?
I am not a woman of color, and I’ll never pretend to be able to fully empathize with how it must feel to deal with the kind of gross appropriation that the Eurocentric beauty community often throws at them. But understanding why it peeves me when I see someone wearing fake freckles, in a way, has better helped me empathize with why a woman of color, for instance, might find it eye-roll worthy for Kylie Jenner to wear cornrows.
Now, I’ll qualify that statement by saying that, obviously, my freckle-feelings are by no means even slightly comparable to the kind of systemic cultural appropriation that women of color have undergone and still undergo beneath a prejudiced fashion and beauty culture.
However, if you feel even slightly peeved at this whole freckle trend, then it should give you even more of a reason to be even angrier at the kind of abhorrent appropriations people of color face day in and day out.
I suppose as much as this trend has allowed me to understand the perspective of my fellow females, it has, on another level, allowed me to love something I used to hate about myself more. It has allowed me to appreciate my freckled figure, even if it still peeves me on occasion.
And hey, if you’re rocking the faux freckle trend, rock on. I’m glad that the world has come to appreciate the power of freckliness. If giving yourself freckles makes you love yourself more, then, by all means, splash a few on.
Finally, to my lovely freckle-having friends out there, including my GORGEOUS friend Maura (who frankly rocks her freckles better than anyone I know), freckle on!
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