How Beauty becomes Politics in the Jamaican Diaspora
Why read this?
Because it’s about skin, hair, and beauty – but really, it’s about identity, belonging, and power. This post explores how Jamaican women in Montreal use beauty practices such as skin lightening and hairstyling not just to look good, but to navigate complex social worlds. If you’ve ever thought beauty is just personal, this might change your mind.
What’s this all based on?
This blog entry is based on ethnographic research: from 2016 to 2020, I conducted multi-sited fieldwork with Jamaican women in Montreal (mainly in a Jamaican-owned beauty salon), as well as in Toronto, Florida, Jamaica, and online. I interviewed them, joined them in salons, churches, and community events, and listened to their stories. The goal was to understand how beauty – something often dismissed as superficial – becomes a deeply social and political practice in the lives of Black diasporic women.
Skin as Strategy: Why Elisha Chose to Bleach
The first time Elisha applied skin lightening cream, she was a teenager. She didn’t see it as a major decision—more like something ordinary, even expected. Her mother used the cream. Her aunt did. Her classmates at school talked about it openly. In their Jamaican Montreal community, it wasn’t a secret, and it wasn’t shameful. It was just part of the beauty routine, like lip gloss or edge control.
She described how the first time she saw herself noticeably lighter in a photo, she felt a strange combination of pride and detachment. 'I looked good, but I didn’t feel like myself.' Still, the reactions she got were unmistakable: more compliments, more attention, even teachers treating her with what she called a new softness. It became a kind of unspoken exchange—lighter skin, smoother interactions.
Over time, Elisha’s use of creams became habitual. It wasn’t about hating her Blackness. It was about fitting in, navigating school without standing out, and accessing what sociologist Margaret Hunter calls the 'light skin privilege.' For Elisha, the shift happened so gradually that she barely noticed—until, one day, she did. She did it because it made life easier. Skin lightning was not about wanting to be white, but about fitting into a world that often treats dark skin as a problem.
Beauty and Belonging: Politics in the Mirror
Beauty is not just about taste. It’s political. bell hooks’ concept of the 'imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy' explains how dominant beauty norms uphold systems of oppression. Jamaican women in Montreal experience this first-hand, as they try to balance the expectations of whiteness with their own sense of self.
Carol’s story brings the abstract politics of beauty down to earth. A teacher who arrived in Montreal in the 1980s, she faced relentless discrimination at work. Colleagues questioned her credentials, parents asked for her white counterparts instead, and landlords turned her away—until she brought along a white friend to vouch for her. Her solution wasn’t loud protest—it was polish. She invested in elegant outfits, conservative hairstyles, and what she called 'Canadian professional style.' Her aim wasn’t to erase her identity but to preempt judgment. It was, in her words, 'how I bought a little respect.'
At home, however, she let down her guard. A vivid memory from the field: Carol preparing for a church event, singing along to Beres Hammond as she adjusted her curly wig. Her work wig, she joked, stayed locked in the closet. This duality—one look for the world, another for her community—wasn’t deception. It was survival.
Sisters, Not Opposites: Two Strategies, One System
To truly understand the complexity of beauty choices, we need to see what is happening in a beauty salon in Montreal where Elisha and her older sister Debby worked side by side. The small space buzzed with reggae music, laughter, and the constant hum of blow dryers. On one wall hung posters of hairstyles—Afros, box braids, sleek wigs. On another, shelves of creams, oils, and lightening products. For the sisters, this was more than a workplace. It was a stage for grappling with beauty norms. Elisha embraces natural beauty and rejects bleaching. Her sister Debby still uses lightening products but sees them as tools, not betrayals. Their choices reflect different ways of navigating the same pressures.
Their differences sparked playful debates in the salon. One day, as Elisha spoke with a customer about the damage of lightning products, Debby interjected, 'Girl, not everything is political. Sometimes we just want to look hot!' The room erupted in laughter—but the moment revealed something serious: how women in the same family, shaped by similar migrations and memories, can live beauty differently. And still love each other through it.
Elisha, in her late twenties, had recently stopped lightning her skin. Her reasons were personal and political: health issues from harsh chemicals, but also a deeper shift in self-awareness. She had begun attending Afrocentric cultural events, reading authors like bell hooks and Audre Lorde, and embracing her identity in a new way. Her look reflected this change: natural curls, minimal makeup, and Afrocentric clothing. 'I want to show the younger girls that they can just be themselves,' she told me one afternoon as she twisted a client’s hair.
From Kingston to Montreal (and Instagram): Beauty on the Move
In a small apartment in Côte-des-Neiges, I sat with three cousins scrolling TikTok together. They paused on a video: a Jamaican influencer showing off a 'Brownin’ makeup routine (Jamaican word for a lighter skinned Black person). They debated her look. 'She’s doing too much,' said one. 'Nah, she looks fly,' said another. This everyday moment illustrates how beauty trends move instantly across transnational borders.
These young women followed dancehall stars and natural hair bloggers with equal intensity. They knew Vybz Kartel’s infamous bleaching saga—and laughed about it. 'He looked like a ghost, but we still played his tracks.' Vybz Kartel — the influential Jamaican dancehall artist — made headlines in April 2025 when he publicly announced the end of his long-standing skin-bleaching practice, admitting he initially did it to highlight his tattoos but now considers it a misguided expression of self-love. At the same time, they admired Toronto-based influencers with afros and bold lips. Beauty, for them, wasn’t either/or. It was remix, reinterpretation, and debate. Diaspora life meant not only watching these trends but participating. They used Caribbean products, North American filters, and local slang—curating identities as fluid as the internet itself.
Afrocentric Resistance: New Norms, New Confidence
Alongside bleaching, many women embrace Afrocentric aesthetics: natural hair, dark skin, African fashion. Elisha's transformation was sparked by these debates of ‘natural beauty’, local Afrocentric events and community support. These counter publics – spaces where alternative values thrive – are crucial for building a different sense of pride and confidence.
On a chilly Saturday in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighborhood, a pop-up shop bustled with women trading hair tips, testing homemade shea butter mixes, and adjusting brightly patterned headwraps. At one corner stood Elisha, now proudly natural, selling her artwork and jewelry: i.e. portraits of dark-skinned women with glowing afros. 'This is the skin I almost lost,' she told a visitor, pointing to a piece titled 'Glow Back.' The woman nodded. 'Been there.'
These events aren’t just marketplaces—they are counter publics. In contrast to salons that push lightening creams, these spaces celebrate kinks, coils, and ancestral pride. One speaker, a local poet and beauty blogger, even began her speech with a moment of silence 'for all the melanin lost to chemicals.' Laughter followed—but so did quiet recognition.
Montreal: Blending In, Standing Out – Switching of Aesthetic Codes
As we can see Montreal’s cultural politics force many Jamaican women to tone down their appearance in public while expressing themselves freely in community spaces. Ms. Brown, a geriatric nurse, for example, wears a straight wig at work but switches to bold curls at Caribbean gatherings. This kind of code-switching shows how aesthetics are shaped by context.
Aesthetic code-switching used as a concept here, is the practice of deliberately adjusting one’s physical appearance — such as hairstyle, clothing, makeup, or skin tone — in response to different social environments, often to align with dominant cultural norms, avoid discrimination, or gain social acceptance. While possibly everyone may shift their appearance slightly based on context (e.g., formal vs. casual settings), aesthetic code-switching takes on heightened significance for marginalized groups, particularly racialized individuals. For them, these changes are not just matters of style, but strategic acts of navigation within systems that often privilege whiteness, Eurocentric beauty standards, or heteronormative professionalism. Unlike linguistic code-switching, which involves shifts in language or speech, aesthetic code-switching plays out visually — on the surface of the body — but is just as deeply tied to power, identity, and survival. Unlike hairstyles or outfits, which can be changed on a daily basis, skin lightening represents a temporally slower, more enduring form of aesthetic adaptation. While it may not allow for the quick reversibility of typical code-switching, it is still a response to the same pressures — a long-term strategy for navigating racialized beauty norms and negotiating visibility, desirability, and belonging in a stratified social world. Therefore, skin lightning, doesn’t “switch” in real time. But it still belongs in the conversation, because it’s part of the same survival toolkit. Just one with higher stakes.
Ms. Brown’s apartment was full of contrasts: Bible verses taped to the mirror, next to curl-defining mousse; gospel CDs stacked beside skin lightning products. As she prepared for her church bingo night, she showed me her wig stand—a curly number for social events, a sleek bob for hospital work, and a braided cap she wore mostly at home. She laughed when I asked which one was 'her.' 'All of them, in a way,' she said. 'But only one gets me paid.'
Stories like hers echoed across interviews. Nurses, teachers, bank tellers—all told of modifying their looks to 'fit' Montreal’s unspoken rules. 'Winter colors, year-round,' one woman joked. Yet in private, these same women adorned themselves in color, vibrancy, and Caribbean flair. Not to impress anyone—but to reconnect with who they are when there is no outside interference.
Conclusion: Beauty as Power – and Survival
In the end, what we call “beauty” is never just skin deep. It’s how Jamaican women in Montreal move through a world that often misreads them — adjusting, resisting, experimenting, surviving. Whether smoothing on a brightening cream, slipping into a straight wig for work, or wrapping natural curls for a night out, these acts are rarely just about looking good, they are politized aesthetics.
They are responses to a deeper question:
How do I want to be seen — and what does it cost to be seen that way? In this negotiation, aesthetic code-switching becomes a vital tool — not just shifting style, but adapting the visible self in order to move through different social worlds.
What began in a bustling salon or over a mirror in a church bathroom reveals something far more intimate: beauty as a living archive of colonial legacies, diasporic belonging, and creative defiance. These women aren’t changing who they are — they’re rearranging the surface, moment by moment, to hold on to dignity, to claim space, and sometimes, to dream aloud in colour. As the Jamaican saying reminds us: “Mi nah change, mi a rearrange.” (“I’m not changing who I am – I’m just adapting how I present myself.”)
Want to Learn More?
hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. South End Press, 2000.
Tate, Shirley Anne. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Ashgate, 2009.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Routledge, 1994, pp. 392–403.
Hunter, Margaret L. Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone. Routledge, 2002.