Lupita Nyong’o Speech – Essence Magazine Best Breakthrough Performance Award

12 Years a Slave star Lupita Nyong’o Speech on Beauty at the Essence Magazine Best Breakthrough Performance Award, is a powerful speech that will inspire you today

Physical beauty is good.

Besides beauty, the most important thing is who you are on the inside.

Historically, dark-skinned women have been influenced by stereotypes propagated through the media to have the wrong mindset about how they look.

From a tender age, young girls have been cultured to believe that having a light skin is better than being dark.

In her speech on Black Beauty Essence for Black Women during the 7th “Black Women In Hollywood” gala held in February 2014 where Lupita was an honoree.

During the speech, she reads part of a letter.

It’s a letter she received from a black young woman who was “saved” from buying lightening creams to make her skin fairer when she learned about Ms. Nyong’o’s success in Hollywood despite her own dark skin.

Lupita goes on to tell her own story about how she lived her entire life wanting to be fair-skinned.

She prayed and beseeched God hoping he would work a miracle for her to just wake up one morning and find that she is no longer dark-skinned.

She even promised God that she would stop stealing her mother’s sugar cubes if he made her fairer. She just wanted the teasing and taunting about her dark looks to stop.

However, this never happened and she was somewhat angry that God would deny her wish. All this time, Lupita’s mom was there to remind her how beautiful she is.

Her mother would always remind her that beauty isn’t something you can eat. It can’t feed you.

Beauty is not something to be acquired or consumed, but something that you just have to be. You cannot rely on how you look to sustain yourself.

The most important thing is to believe in yourself and live a life full of compassion for those around you and beyond.

Feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, doing unwarranted things in order to fit into society, the inner need to be wanted and accepted; are just a few of the problems that the dark-skinned woman has had to endure.

Gradually but surely, these words of wisdom from Lupita’s Mom made her accept herself and her dark skin.

Through her influence and that of other dark-skinned celebrities like Alek Wek, many black women have come to also accept themselves.

Lupita and Alek have not only embraced their dark completions openly and even come out publicly to speak on this matter but also succeeded in the arts and modeling world despite their complexions.