The Kenyan actress, Lupita Nyong'o, who received the 2014 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in 12 Years as a Slave, offered this moving reflection on the nature of true beauty:
I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only saw pale skin. I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin. And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned … [But] every day I experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark as I had been the day before. I tried to negotiate with God: I told him I would stop stealing sugar cubes at night if he gave me what I wanted; I would listen to my mother's every word and never lose my school sweater again if he just made me a little lighter. But I guess God was unimpressed with my bargaining chips because He never listened.
And when I was a teenager my self-hate grew worse … My mother reminded me often that she thought that I was beautiful but that was no consolation: She's my mother, of course she's supposed to think I am beautiful … And my mother again would say to me, "You can't eat beauty. It doesn't feed you." And these words plagued and bothered me … until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be … And what my mother meant when she said you can't eat beauty was that you can't rely on how you look to sustain you.
