Kim Kardashian Admits To Darkening Her Skin As The First Step Of Her Makeup Routine
It is a thin line between bronzing your skin to enhance your glow and outright participating in “blackfishing”—the act of enhancing features to appear Black.
Kim Kardashian has once again found herself on the latter side, and Twitter is not having it.
This week, the Keeping Up With The Kardashian reality star ignited a social media firestorm after revealing, on her Instagram Stories, her secret to creating the "Kim" look using her KKW Beauty products.
While the makeup tutorial was quite simple, fans were taken aback when she used her waterproof body makeup to darker her hands, which she considered “pale.”
“@kkwbeauty Body Make Up is perfect for hands [because] my hands are always pale & our formula is waterproof so you can wash your hands! We used color Light/Medium,” she wrote on the post.
While there is no denying that the makeup did an outstanding job adding color to her skin, thanks to the side-by-side photo that shows one hand visibly darker than the other, naturally, the Internet is calling the media and makeup mogul out for once again participating in cultural appropriation and promoting unrealistic beauty ideals.
While Kim reportedly created KKW to assist with her psoriasis diagnosis, this wouldn’t be the first time the 39-year-old socialite was given the side-eye for embodying the very thing we’ve so often been discounted for—our melanin.
In December 2019, Kim was called out for appearing on the cover of 7Hollywood Magazine in what many believed to be “blackface.”
“Lighting” was the reported culprit for why the Armenian star was noticeably darker in the photos.
In 2017, Kim was also subject to public scrutiny after she posted a photo on Twitter modeling her KKW Beauty line looking completely darker than usual.
Initially considering the look “contour”, Kim later apologized after her feed was flooded with backlash.
“I would obviously never want to offend anyone. I used an amazing photographer and a team of people. I was really tan when we shot the images, and it might be that the contrast was off,” Kardashian told the New York Times in 2017. “But I showed the image to many people, to many in the business. No one brought that to our attention. No one mentioned it.”
She continued, "Of course, I have the utmost respect for why people might feel the way they did. But we made the necessary changes to that photo and the rest of the photos. We saw the problem, and we adapted and changed right away. Definitely I have learned from it."
