Self-Mastery Style Coach | Ensuring your style reflects your soul through personal style refinement
I enjoy learning how conditioning impacts soul expression within different cultures. Here are my observations about the effects of chromophobia on southern African American women’s personal style. White supremacy has refined and polished black women’s expression for so long that some of us are literally afraid of color. We don’t embrace color, see it as a vital component of our identity, or deem it necessary to incorporate it into our outfits regularly because that goes against the safety we’ve created through assimilation. Color doesn’t “protect” us the way neutrals would, and color doesn’t allow us to shrink and blend into spaces that discourage our joy. There are so many rules and contradictions around wearing color as African American women that make it hard to fully appreciate and embrace our true soul expression. For instance: You can’t wear too many neutrals because you’ll look too frumpy or motherly. Yet, if you wear too much color, you’ll be infantilized and/or ridiculed because “you’re too old for that”. You can’t wear red lipstick before a certain age because that’s “too fast, grown, and sexy”. Yet, girls in other cultures can wear various styles of makeup, “inappropriate” or not, from a young age without the same social consequences and criticisms. You can’t dress in ways that reflect your interests if it delineates from the expected or general cultural expression; ie. going through an “emo phase” and wearing all black because that’s “white people stuff”. Yet, if you wear too much color you look tacky and “want to be seen” by attention seeking. The constant policing of how and when color is worn by some southern African American women is what happens when we sacrifice our joy for perceived safety. African American girls and women of ALL ages and regions deserve to make color a safe haven and tool for unlimited freedom of expression without criticism or questioning. To dive more into deconditioning and defining your identity, sign up for my FREE masterclass called “True Style Recovery” where you’ll learn to decondition your mind, define your identity, and express yourself in a way that mirrors the soul. 🧠🪪 Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gtRX6Xvu
