Women With Vitiligo Are Finally Feeling Seen

"Why blend in when you can choose how to stand out?" The question sounds like a tagline for your typical makeup ad, but CoverGirl's new foundation campaign released Tuesday was anything but. In it, model Amy Deanna, who has vitiligo—a skin condition that causes a loss of melanin—uses two different shades to highlight her hypopigmentation. Not even 24 hours later, U.K. fashion brand Missguided unveiled mannequins with vitiligo. The news of both exploded on social media, along of an outpouring of excitement, particularly from women who have the condition.

"The fashion world has a history of perpetuating dangerous norms and unrealistic standards of beauty," Jesi Taylor, a 27-year-old activist in New York City, tells Glamour. "Seeing Amy in this campaign made me cry for a while. I never thought I'd see the day that a CoverGirl had vitiligo. A CoverGirl! I used to watch those commercials with the 'easy, breezy, beautiful' CoverGirls and think, Imagine if one had vitiligo, and I'd laugh."

Taylor says that visibility for vitiligo is getting better thanks to models like Winnie Harlow and Deanna. But when she was younger, it was a much different story. "It felt incredibly alienating and depressing. Not only was vitiligo misunderstood by the media, strangers, and my peers, but I also couldn't relate to anyone during the most difficult years of my life," says Taylor. "I'd mostly hear cruel jokes and common misconceptions thrown around about vitiligo. I felt ugly and strange, and people were openly uncomfortable around me, mostly due to lack of representation."

Jasmine Aguilar, 24, a production operator from Austin, Texas, says her experience was similar: "[Growing up], I didn't feel pretty. It felt like other [people] thought I had a disease and didn’t want to touch me because they didn't know what was wrong with my skin." Kennedy Newton, a 19-year-old Florida student, says she also felt ostracized after she developed vitiligo on her face at the age of eight. "I never met anyone with the same condition as me," she says. "It makes you wonder if something is wrong with the way you look."

With these positive, widespread examples of vitiligo in the news, though, all three women are hopeful it'll lead to more necessary conversations around the condition. "People, more and more, will learn what vitiligo is and might stop asking 'Is it contagious?'" says Taylor. "They’ll realize it’s just skin."

In her experience Taylor says that self-acceptance was a long time coming. For five years she wouldn't leave her bedroom without a thick, "security blanket" layer of makeup. She stopped wearing makeup altogether when she realized that she wasn't putting it on for herself, but because she felt like she had to for other people. "It didn’t help that strangers would often ask me if I was wearing blackface—you’d be surprised how often," she says. "I used to completely cover the white spots on my face and neck with concealer and foundation, and sometimes lip pencil, then I'd blend for an even look that was closer to my brown skin. I’ve considered wearing makeup again, but ever since I stopped wearing it, I just feel more me without it. I’m curious about trying it like Amy wears it, though. It looks really awesome."

Similarly, Iomikoe Johnson, a 38-year-old model from Louisiana, stopped wearing makeup after Winnie Harlow's self-acceptance inspired her. "I got vitiligo when I was 25—I wasn't born with it," she says. "I faced a lot of adversities. People never wanted to shake my hand or would come up to me and be so rude. I've had guys ask, 'What the hell is wrong with your face?'" Representation, she says, has been crucial both in how others see her, and how she sees herself. "Vitiligo isn't contagious, but our confidence is. We can change the face of beauty."

And that's what makes the CoverGirl campaign so groundbreaking. It's not only a message of self-acceptance, Deanna's commercial also shows that women with vitiligo can wear makeup while still emphasizing what sets them apart. "I want to embrace exactly who I am," Angela Stingle, 47, an Atlanta-based business consultant tells Glamour. "It was empowering for [Deanna] to show that you can challenge the norms of what people think are beautiful. Just because you may not have basic one-toned skin color like everybody else doesn't mean you're any less beautiful."

As Taylor puts it: "European beauty standards need to be dismantled to make room for more diverse types of beauty to be seen. Models like Winnie and Amy do just that."

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