It seems like Hollywood darling Lupita Nyong'o is here to stay. Apart from her well-deserved Oscar win for her role in 12 Years a Slave, the Mexico-born Kenyan stunner was named People's Most Beautiful Woman, resulting in a resounding "duh!" from the Internet (us included). It seems obvious that she's gorgeous, but Lupita herself had some trouble believing as much. In Glamour's December issue, the recently crowned Woman of the Year opened up about her road to self-acceptance.
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It started out in a pretty rocky way: "European standards of beauty are something that plague the entire world," says Lupita. "The idea that darker skin is not beautiful, that light skin is the key to success and love. Africa is no exception. When I was in the second grade, one of my teachers said, 'Where are you going to find a husband? How are you going to find someone darker than you?' I was mortified."
Unfortunately, it wasn't just real-life interactions that almost convinced Lupita that her looks weren't up to par: "I remember seeing a commercial where a woman goes for an interview and doesn't get the job," she says. "Then she puts a cream on her face to lighten her skin, and she gets the job! This is the message: that dark skin is unacceptable. I definitely wasn't hearing this from my immediate family—my mother never said anything to that effect—but the voices from the television are usually much louder than the voices of your parents."
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What helped turn it all around was being able to see herself reflected in the world in the world at large. "Until I saw people who looked like me, doing the things I wanted to, I wasn't so sure it was a possibility," says Lupita. "Seeing Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah in The Color Purple, it dawned on me: 'Oh—I could be an actress!' We plant the seed of possibility." And now, she's paying it forward and doing it for young black girls in a truly beautiful cycle.
Lupita mother also had to do something with her forming what seems like a pretty rock-solid sense of self: "My mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features," she says. "She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty. Beautiful people have many advantages, but so do friendly people.... I think beauty is an expression of love." Amen to that!
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