The real reason Alicia Keys stopped wearing makeup

A Story of a Celebrity which many of us will be interested in

Alicia Keys had everyone talking when she arrived at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards in August 2016 wearing (gasp!) no makeup. What was the decision behind her bold mode? As it turns out, that choice was a long time coming. 

In a powerful essay for Lena Dunham's newsletter Lenny, published May 31, 2016, Keys discussed how her many years in the public eye had altered her perception of beauty and perfection. "I remember when I first started to be in the public eye. Oh my gawd! Everyone had something to say," she wrote. "'She's so hard, she acts like a boy, she must be gay, she should be more feminine!' But the truth is, I was just from New York, and everyone I knew acted like that."

Keys continued, "But this wasn't the streets of New York. This was the harsh, judgmental world of entertainment and my biggest test yet." Keys said the pressures of the industry turned her into a "chameleon" who was "constantly changing so all the 'they's' would accept me." She wrote, "Every time I left the house, I would be worried if I didn't put on makeup: What if someone wanted a picture?? What if they POSTED it??? These were the insecure, superficial, but honest thoughts I was thinking. And all of it, one way or another, was based too much on what other people thought of me."

When it came time to work on her newest album, In Common, Keys revealed she had a Network-esque, "mad-as-hell" moment about the public's standards of beauty for women. "Before I started my new album, I wrote a list of all the things that I was sick of," she said in her Lenny essay. "And one was how much women are brainwashed into feeling like we have to be skinny, or sexy, or desirable, or perfect."

"One of the many things I was tired of was the constant judgment of women," she said. "The constant stereotyping through every medium that makes us feel like being a normal size is not normal, and heaven forbid if you're plus-size. Or the constant message that being sexy means being naked. All of it is so frustrating and so freakin' impossible."

With this "a-ha" moment in place, Keys soon began to notice that many of the songs she had written were about "masks filled with metaphors about hiding." Her song, "When a Girl Can't Be Herself," includes the lyrics, "Who says I must conceal what i'm made of  Maybe all this is covering my self-esteem."

"No disrespect to Maybelline, the word just worked after the maybe," Keys wrote in her Lenny essay. "But the truth is…I was really starting to feel like that—that, as I am, I was not good enough for the world to see."

With all of these thoughts and questions floating about in her mind, Keys—who credits meditation for helping her find "clarity and a deeper knowledge" of herself—finally discovered a way to channel her frustrations into a positive message, albeit accidentally. Writing for Lenny, Keys recalled arriving for a photo shoot fresh from the gym wearing a baseball hat and scarf. The photographer, Paola Kudacki, wanted to shoot her as she arrived—real and raw to reflect the real and raw music on her album. Although she hesitated at first, Keys finally gave in. The result, she wrote, was powerful.

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