Nadine Noor | Beauty of Pride

Growing up, my relationship with like hair and makeup

and beauty was very much influenced

by being South Asian

and being Muslim.

Dark eyeliner,

long, dark, shiny hair,

oiled hair. [chuckles]

It's very like maximalist.

There's gonna be more and more, more, more, more

and that definitely comes out in the hair and the makeup.

Beauty hacks or beauty advice?

I mean, it all really comes like from my mother,

which is like you moisturize

10 minutes straight after the shower

while you're still wet

because that like locks moisture in.

You moisturize your whole body

in the morning and at night

and you exfoliate your body

in like two different ways.

So my mum would have like a scrubber

and then we would always have some form

of other scrub, like salt scrub

and we would do that like once a week.

Growing up, I would obviously have

a lot of influence from like South Asian culture.

But then when I was starting to come into my own,

I wanted to be the opposite of that.

So I was like, How can I be the opposite

to everything I know?

And I was like, I'm gonna be goth.

And that was a way of me like, rebelling against like,

the culture that that I grew up with.

In a way, it was like internalized racism.

In one hand I feel really sad for

because it was a shame that I had,

that came from not liking myself.

But on the other hand,

there's some crossover with South Asian culture in there

'cause it's dark hair and eyeliner, you know?

So maybe it actually wasn't as far away as I thought it was.

This is turning into a therapy session.

I would definitely subscribe to

a certain type of femininity

where my eyebrows were always done,

my hair was always done,

and I did that very much to appeal to men.

When I was about 24, 25,

I bleached my eyebrows.

But then the reaction that I got from that

was really interesting

because if men no longer saw me,

they never took an interest in me anymore

and I didn't know was going to be

such a radical thing for me.

And I felt so free afterwards

'cause I was not getting as much male attention as I was.

Yeah, it doesn't feel that radical

in the wider scheme of things,

but it was for me at the time.

Even though it's difficult to

ignore the commercialization of it,

it's important to still recognize that,

Hey this is like a month for us.

There's plenty of people that it's still like important to.

But if I just go back to the word itself, pride.

Proud.

And for a long time I wasn't.

I had so much shame in who I was.

So in that regard, it's important.

We, as LGBTQ people, have a legacy

of using any platform that we have

or even creating platforms for ourselves

to speak about injustice,

to speak about who we are,

to create more space for ourselves

and other people that are more marginalized than us.

It's just inherent as part of our legacy.

In this society that we live in,

productivity is seen as

that that should be rewarded

and almost like burnout can sometimes

be like a badge of honor.

Rest is not a reward.

You shouldn't be afforded rest.

You shouldn't wait till burnout to rest.

Like it's not a reward.

You should take it whenever you can.

I would say the most that I feel beautiful

is probably like when I'm with my partner.

Waking up in the morning

and I'm just filled with, like, a lot of like love

because we're, you know,

seeing each other for the first time that morning

and you say, Hello, good morning, I love you.

And the world hasn't really ever started yet

and you're just pure presence,

like a pure being.

No way did I think that I would ever be here.

First of all, unfortunately,

like I didn't think I would make it to this age.

I always had this inherent thing to me

because I had so much lack of self-worth

that I just like, there's no way that I was going

to make it beyond my thirties.

And now that I'm here and still alive,

one of my greatest achievements. [chuckles]

No way would I think that I would be happy,

that I would be proud.

I'm really, really grateful to everyone around me

and also with myself for pushing through, you know?

I was really nervous about

how this was going to work out.

And now that it's here,

I can see myself in it somehow,

which I just didn't think that that was going to happen.

Here we go.

I think she's gorgeous.