• The Illustrator of Curves Is the Instagram That Loves Your Body Unconditionally (and Hopes You Do, Too)

    If your holiday season is going anything like mine, you’re already plotting how to take off a few new pounds in the new year. While ’tis the season to shower our family and friends with love, our self-care can unfortunately take a bit of a hit in the process.Since none of us is immune to…

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  • Queen: CCH Pounder Celebrates the Art of Black Womanhood With an Exhibition at Xavier University

    If you watch television, chances are you’ve watched CCH Pounder. Over the past 38 years, the Emmy-winning Guyanese actress—who celebrated her 65th birthday on Christmas Day—has accumulated well over 100 acting credits, including recurring roles in the Avatar franchise, ER, The Shield, Law and Order: SVU, Sons of Anarchy and, currently, NCIS: New Orleans. New…

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  • #BlackBoyJoy: The #CastMeJCrew Grand Prize Goes to 4-Year-Old Cayden!

    Watch out, world! In what might be the best holiday present ever, the dapper and diminutive Cayden (aka @cayden_style on Instagram) beat out all other contenders for the grand prize in J.Crew’s inaugural #CastMeJCrew contest—a campaign notably started by a hashtag from Elle Fashion Features Director Nikki Ogunnaike. Cayden, who just started pre-K this fall,…

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  • For Colored Girls … Who Need to Talk About Colorism

    How do you feel about this film? Or, perhaps a better question is: How does this film make you feel? I’m going to be honest: When I saw this film, Marian Edusei’s Dark Skinned Girls, on Dazed, I felt a mixture of horror, wonder, disappointment, disgust, confusion, intrigue, envy and amusement—perhaps in that order. But,…

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  • She Got That Glow: Zendaya Is Officially a Black Butterfly

    Baby girl. Proving once again that her red-carpet game is ridiculous, Zendaya hit the Australian premiere of her new film, The Greatest Showman (co-starring Hugh Jackman), styled by “image architect” Law Roach into the monarch she is in a stunning Moschino gown. With a gorgeous saffron eye, Stuart Weitzman heels and a subtly finger-waved chignon…

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  • Full Circle and Forward: The Renaissance of Dapper Dan

    Gazing down from a billboard overlooking 125th Street (aka Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) in Harlem, “Dapper Dan”—born Daniel Day—appears every bit what his longtime moniker suggests. Adjusting the lapel of his impeccably tailored suit, he looks like a man who has arrived—though he never left the New York City neighborhood he called home. His…

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  • Amazing Grace: The Glow Up Talks to Greenleaf’s Merle Dandridge

    There’s an innate groundedness, a humility, about actress and singer Merle Dandridge. It’s a quality that’s immediately calming to the listener and connects you with her. The Glow Up had the pleasure of catching up with Dandridge during her current run on Broadway as Papa Ge—a riff on the Haitian Creole god Guédé—in the revival…

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  • These Ain’t Red Bottoms: Cardi B’s Putting Her Foot in a New Collab With Steve Madden

    Our favorite regular, degular, shmegular reality/rapping phenom keeps making “money moves.” This week, Cardi B debuted a curated selection from fast-fashion fave Steve Madden, a partnership that makes her signature style accessible to the masses who can only dream about owning a pair of “red bottoms.” And while famed shoe designer Christian Louboutin may be…

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  • Mahalo for the Holidays! Sephora Features Its 1st Afro-Hawaiian Beauty … and So, So Much More

    That skin. That glow. That hair. Sephora’s 2017 holiday campaign features a new crop of models—freshly plucked from their very own stores. We got hip to this via Anne Branigin, The Root’s news fellow, and instantly fell in love with Afro-Hawaiian curve-tastic beauty Taíja, giving us urban-Moana realness. (Yes, we know the character Moana isn’t…

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  • Sephora Is Selling a $38 Jar of Coconut Oil, and Black Women Everywhere Are Unimpressed

    It’s the holiday season, so I’ve put myself on a bit of a moratorium from my usual Sephora habit, since I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who deserves presents this Christmas. That said, I occasionally get my fix by drifting through its virtual aisles and living vicariously through friends’ shopping sprees, which is…

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