All women are beautiful, and there is something special about every single one of them. There is not one woman on this Earth that should ever have to hear someone tell her otherwise.American fashion model
Simone Thompson, better known as Slick Woods, has been berated on Twitter and told she’s not beautiful. Woods has graced the cover of Elle Magazine, modeled for Fenty Beauty and collaborated with Calvin Klein and Moschino for ad campaigns. The combination of her bald head, tattoos and gapped teeth make her as striking as she is beautiful.
Hateful Twitter users have said if she was just a regular girl walking down the street, no one would think anything of her. However, she was just a “regular girl” on the street when model Ash Stymest saw her at a bus stop in Los Angeles and introduced her to fashion photographer David Mushegain, which began her career.
There is no such thing as “conventional beauty.” Traditional Eurocentric beauty should not be the singular standard. There are different types of beauty other than skinny, small-featured white women. Model Jelena Noura “Gigi” Hadid is beautiful, but her and women who look like her are not the only ones.
This standard of beauty excludes women of color, women with bigger facial features and women who are plus-sized. These attributes describe most women — the beauty industry is excluding most women.
The visible divide in the traditional beauty promoted by the industry can be seen in the creation of makeup and more specifically, foundation. There are usually more shades of “white” foundation than there are of any other color, which makes it hard for darker-skinned women to find makeup that matches their skin tone.
Makeup lines have recently been trying to offer more shades for their skin products, but it’s not even close to being enough. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty has made an effort to include almost exclusively women of color in promotions and advertising. She recently had a fashion show for her line of lingerie, and all of her models were women of color, one of them being Woods.
Woods is not a Forever 21 model. She is a high fashion model for Vogue Italia, Japanese Vogue and American Vogue, among others. She has walked in fashion shows for Yves Saint Laurent, Rihanna Fenty x Puma, Yeezy, Fendi, Miu Miu, Jeremy Scott and Marc Jacobs. She does not look like everyone else, and she is beautiful. Anyone Rihanna thinks is beautiful is automatically beautiful, if you ask me.
Models are artists displaying clothing, but they are also art themselves. The quality of clothing matches the quality of the model. Woods didn’t land all those big-brand deals because she’s ugly.
Instead of calling women who aren’t traditionally beautiful “ugly,” we should be celebrating diversity. Diverse skin tones, diverse faces and diverse body types should all be respected. All women are beautiful, and we should be honoring every type of woman no matter what they look like.
Ashlon Lusk is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Houston, Texas.