If you watched NBC's The Voice preview on Sunday night, chances are you noticed that new judge and singer, Alicia Keys had absolutely no makeup on. I'm not talking natural-looking makeup, like many celebs rock these days. Not a drop of makeup on. No foundation, no concealer–nada! Get ready to see her completely bare-faced when the show premieres on September 19 because Keys has made the decision to no longer wear makeup at all, ever, and here's why:
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Image via Alicia Keys/Instagram
She opened up about this in a Lenny Letter.
Back in May, Keys wrote a Lenny Letter (the feminist site created by Girls masterminds Lena Dunham and Jenni Conner), where she came public with her decision to go completely bare-faced. "I don’t want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing."
She’s tired of caring about what people think.
“I remember when I first started to be in the public eye. Oh my gawd! Everyone had something to say. '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. '"
She felt like she couldn’t be herself.
“This was the harsh, judgmental world of entertainment and my biggest test yet. I started, more than ever, to become a chameleon. Never fully being who I was, but constantly changing so all the 'they’s' would accept me.”
She was fed up with the constant judgement of women.
"Before I started my new album, I wrote a list of all the things that I was sick of. 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. 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," she wrote.
The pressure was affecting her self-esteem.
"In one song I wrote, called 'When a Girl Can’t Be Herself,' it says: 'In the morning from the minute that I wake up / What if I don’t want to put on all that makeup / Who says I must conceal what I’m made of / Maybe all this Maybelline is covering my self-esteem.' "
She started to feel like she wasn’t good enough for the world to see.
More from her powerful letter: "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."
She got to know herself better.
“I found my way to meditation, and I started focusing on clarity and a deeper knowing of myself. I focused on cultivating strength and conviction and put a practice in place to learn more about the real me.”
Her new single inspired the no-makeup revelation.
Keys showed up to a photo shoot for her single "In Common," straight from the gym without a drop of makeup on. She even had a head scarf on. She planned to get her hair and makeup done there at the shoot but the photographer wanted to shoot her exactly the way she looked. "I swear it is the strongest, most empowered, most free, and most honestly beautiful that I have ever felt," Keys wrote. "I felt powerful because my initial intentions realized themselves. My desire to listen to myself, to tear down the walls I built over all those years, to be full of purpose and to be myself!"
