My FYP has been littered with people throwing it back to their cringiest, most Kylie-Jenner-coded 2016 selfies. While I’m not quite millennial enough to publicly partake, I was narcissistic enough to think, “We’ll have a look”.
My Facebook is practically a shrine to the 2010s. Except for a brief post-COVID photo dump stint and the annual happy birthday post from my mum, my account and I have been consciously uncoupled since about 2019. It was only a few scrolls before I hit my posts from a decade ago. The chokers, bold brows and dog-face filters I’d been expecting didn’t surprise me. The real jump scare was seeing just how much I’d edited my pictures back then. More specifically, my skin tone.
Courtesy of Robyn Eugene
Courtesy of Robyn Eugene
I grew up in an extremely white, conservative bubble of South East London, my siblings and I among a handful of non-white children at our primary school. Between pencils being stuck in my curly hair in primary school and the teenage boys I fancied saying they could “Never kiss a Black girl”, I absorbed a rigid set of beauty ideals early. What we call beauty is, after all, a social construct. It shifts with geography, with time and trends. At that time, I wasn’t seeing Black women celebrated on TV or in films. The girls who were admired, desired and “wifed up” in school were white, as were the boys we giggled about in class and tried to position as our Snapchat best friends (IYKYK).
Those ideals are visible in the 17-year-old preserved in my 2016 Facebook archive. My now-signature curls frazzled and bleached into wispy strands. Foundation in the lightest possible shade, made lighter still with amateur Picsart edits. The photos look shocking, silly even, to my 26-year-old eyes. But back then, they felt like proof. Proof that I was beautiful. Proof that I fit in.
Courtesy of Robyn Eugene
Courtesy of Robyn Eugene
In hindsight, I think I was just desperate to belong. Recently, there’s been a wave of discourse on social media from mixed-race people describing how they often felt ‘too black’ for white spaces and ‘too white’ for black spaces. That resonates deeply. Having moved predominantly through white spaces before escaping to university, I think I wasn’t just chasing belonging; I was chasing safety. Being Black was never the problem. It was the anti-blackness that was so deeply rooted in my social experiences. I wanted to be desired, to be celebrated. Not merely tolerated, as so much of early education taught me we should be towards difference.
The photo editing era itself is a cultural artefact. By 2016, Instagram had been around long enough for basic filters to feel outdated. Editing apps became more sophisticated and more mainstream. The Kardashian-Jenner industrial complex set the visual standard, and social media hardened into a place of hyper-curation. A highlights reel not just of our lives, but of our faces and bodies too.
I didn’t stop tweaking and distorting my images until I was well into my twenties. It felt normal. Blur a spot here. Tuck in my stomach there. Lighten my skin everywhere. Looking back now, I can see how much both I and the culture have shifted since then. Inclusivity has become more than a buzzword. Body diversity is visible. Acne-textured skin, limb differences, and darker skin tones appear on billboards, on brand campaigns, and across Instagram feeds.
Social media itself has evolved too. Authenticity sells. Realness engages. The polished grid has given way to chaotic photo dumps. TikTok’s dominance is built on unfiltered glimpses into niche interests, messy bedrooms, and unglamorous routines. Perfection has lost cultural currency.
Courtesy of Robyn Eugene
Courtesy of Robyn Eugene
But personal unlearning took longer. It took years of self-work, conversations with people who had navigated similar experiences, and relationships that forced nuance and honesty to not only ‘tolerate’ my own blackness but to revel in it and explore it. I love my culture, my skin, and how it bonds me to my family, my history and my community. Representation helped too. Seeing Black women increasingly celebrated in media and industry mattered more than I knew how to articulate at the time.