Unretouched: Eritrean Women on Beauty Standards and Self-Love
In an Eritrean household, beauty is rarely neutral. It arrives with a commentary track: “Your skin is getting dark, stay out of the sun.” “Why do you keep your hair like that, so wild?” “She was beautiful when she was thinner.” These are not strangers making observations. These are the people who love you.
We spoke to four Eritrean women across the diaspora about navigating the beauty standards they inherited — and the ones they are rewriting.
“I was told fair skin meant I was kept indoors, which meant I was cherished.”
Selam, 31, grew up hearing that her lighter complexion was a blessing. “It was framed as a compliment, but what it really said was: darker skin is less desirable. I internalised that before I understood what colourism was.” She noticed it most at Habesha weddings, where lighter-skinned women consistently received more attention, more compliments, more questions about their availability. “When I started dating, I realised I had been taught to value the wrong thing. My skin is exactly the shade it should be.”
“My mother cried when I cut my hair.”
Meron, 24, has worn her hair natural for three years. The journey there was not greeted with applause. “Habesha women have a complicated relationship with texture. The tighter the curl, the more unmanageable it is considered. My mother genuinely believed I was ruining my appearance.” She now runs a small Instagram community for Habesha women embracing their natural hair. “Every time someone posts their first big chop, I cry a little. I know what that took.”
“I stopped bleaching when I realised I was hiding from myself.”
Rahel, 28, used skin-lightening creams throughout university. “Everyone I knew used them. It was not a secret — it was a routine, like moisturising.” She stopped when she saw an unretouched photograph of herself at a family gathering and did not recognise the woman in the image. “I had been fading myself for years. I threw away every product that day.”
“Food and body talk is the love language I am unlearning.”
Winta, 36, describes Habesha food culture as a contradiction: “They will plate you enough injera to feed a village, then comment that you have gained weight. The same auntie who pushed seconds on you at lunch will ask, during coffee, if you have considered dieting.” She has stopped engaging. “I change the subject now. Firmly. Kindly. Every single time. It took years to stop the internal commentary too.”
These conversations are not easy. But they are happening — in WhatsApp groups, over coffee, in DMs between women who are tired of performing a version of themselves they never chose. Unretouched is not about filters. It is about looking at yourself clearly and deciding: this is enough.
Untouched Heritage is Nay-Na’s space for unfiltered, honest conversations about identity, wellness, and the beauty of showing up as yourself.
