Kenza is an author, columnist, teacher and producer.
The word ethnic is everywhere: from fashion to beauty, from cooking to decoration, it has truly become an adjective that is inseparable from our aesthetic references. But do we really know what it refers to? When I ask my friend Google to show me pictures of "ethnic beauty" I find a rather eclectic selection of images: Aishwarya Rai for a L'Oreal ad, Lupita Nyong'o in all her guises, Rihanna for a Nivea day cream, but also Kim Kardashian in Indian finery ... Alongside them, a whole bunch of faces from the four corners of the world, often with curly or kinky hair, who actually have only one thing in common that they are not "Caucasian".
Our old friend the Larousse defines ethnic as relating to the ethnic group, a human grouping that has a homogeneous family, economic and social structure, whose unity is based on a community of language, culture and group consciousness.
Lupita Nyong'o is Mexican-Kenyan, Rihanna is from the island of Barbados and Aishwarya Rai is Indian. They are far from belonging to a homogeneous human group, united by the same language, the same culture or any common consciousness. They are simply "non-white" beauties in short, to whom the beauty market attributes, in a way as practical as encompassing, the term "ethnic beauties", a bit like the "Rest of the World" line in European airports.
For several years now, the supply of beauty products and associated services for so-called mixed-race populations, in a strictly non-Caucasian definition of the term, has been booming. This growth has brought with it the use of a word that has no meaning outside of its sociological context, and that reveals a form of ordinary racism based on a simplification of non-Western identities and aesthetics. In order to make this term disappear, it is first of all up to the people concerned to stop using it to qualify their work and to dissociate themselves from the ethnic appellation.
If we stick to the definition of the word ethnic, any person and any form of beauty can be considered as ethnic, all depends on the point of view from which we place ourselves. If Indian, Kenyan, Barbadian women are considered as ethnic beauties in the eyes of the Western beauty actors, could they imagine on the contrary that English, American or Swedish women are perceived as ethnic beauties on the other side of the world? Because in the end, it is about relative exoticism and nothing else.
