“Writing the memoir, I realized the impact the experience had on my own view of beauty,” she says. “And accepting myself as a pretty, brown-skinned little girl who grew up in Iowa. I thought I was beautiful because my mother said so, and my family said so, but the world said otherwise.” Let it sit. “It will be the same now a face for Estée Lauderit’s kind of ironic because I didn’t feel beautiful until Black Hollywood told me I was beautiful.”
That an entire generation of black women found the mirror of black beauty in Nia Long, while Long herself was still waiting to see it, says something about how beauty standards work and how much effort it takes to transform them. After all, Nineties Fine did not emerge from a vacuum. It was a corrective, Black Hollywood response to the fact that the larger industry had made Black women invisible for a century, or worse, made us visible in ways that were completely out of our control. Long’s most iconic characters—and indeed Long herself—reflected a new vision of beauty, the black leading lady, expansive in some ways, still restrictive in others. Now, some 30 years later, Long embodies a new facet of being a black woman in Hollywood.
“Don’t break black” is constantly waved at black women, ostensibly as a compliment, but it sometimes erases the very real pressures of aging—especially aging on a public stage, especially when a certain image of people is stored in amber.
But Long isn’t interested in pretending the body doesn’t transform. “I’m 55. I have hormonal things. Your body changes, it changes. It’s a whole new body.” He does not wish for it. He also ate the truffle parmesan fries and doesn’t seem conflicted about it at all. He mentions his upcoming press tour Michael, that she wants to be in beautiful clothes, but she also wants French fries.
