I Love My Kinky Curly Hair! (Miyi Hair Review)

Posted on January 31, 2017 by The Glam Femme-inist

As those of you who follow me on Instagram may know, I have been wearing Miyi Hair faithfully. It is hands down the best hair I have ever used. I’m not normally an extensions girl, but I have had a few sew-ins in my lifetime. This is the first time I’ve used kinky curly hair and I love it! Miyi hair is 100% virgin, human hair and comes in a variety of kinky curly textures, as well as a kinky straight texture. The texture I have is 3b/3c and I used 14′, 16′, and 18′ bundles. This hair is super soft and the amazing thing about it is how versatile it is. You can wear it with a very defined curl or you can brush it out to get more texture. You can use different products on it, or no product at all, depending on the look you’re going for – just like your natural hair! Best of all, as Glams, you can use my exclusive discount code, #THEGLAMFEMME to get 10% off your Miyi Hair bundles. Continue reading for a full hair review.

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#MillennialGirlMagic

Posted on January 24, 2017 by The Glam Femme-inist

As far as I’m concerned, people in my generation are the only true millennials. I mean, I graduated from high school in the year 2000, the beginning of the new millennium (by popular opinion, if not the actual beginning). They said that those in my class represented the future. It was an honor, yes, but it also came with very high expectations. Apparently, now there are two decades of people, most of whom are younger than us, who have been dubbed millennials and for whatever their reasons, older generations look down on millennials as a whole today. I guess things have changed.

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Winter Fashion: What Every Glam Must Have for 2017

Posted on January 10, 2017 by The Glam Femme-inist

Winter is here and because I hate the cold I usually have to find a silver lining to this change of season. Right now, the silver lining is putting together new outfits to make going outside in the Winter more bearable. I’ve been having some fun combining my Fall pieces with new winter pieces to make weather-appropriate, but stylish outfits. Here are some of my favorite Winter must-have looks!

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My Feminine Experience

Posted on November 28, 2016 by The Glam Femme-inist

My Feminine Experience, for She Cult

My feminine experience is characterized by my pride in being a woman. As a woman I can express myself and my femininity however I want, no matter what anyone else thinks. I express my femininity in little things like changing my hairstyle at random and trying to enhance my novice make-up skills. I express my femininity in the broader sense by being multi-dimensional and representing brown, queer, womanhood.

I represent the fight and the struggle and the magic and the glory that is being a woman. My mother, my grandmother, and even my little sister taught me how these important ingredients work together to make women so unique and powerful. Feminine of center people all share these characteristics because presenting as feminine has always been seen as a weakness and we have always had to defy the odds – both actual and presumed. I take pride in defying the stereotype of being unable to withstand or survive. When I am loud, when I am opinionated, and when I am a fighter I am proudly embracing my femininity. When I cry, when I am quiet, and when I am vulnerable I am proudly embracing my femininity. I proudly embrace my femininity while I am actively taking a stand against gender norms because I know that gender is a spectrum and therefore so is femininity. Anyone who falls anywhere on the panorama of the feminine identity should be respected for who they are and not judged on who they are assumed to be.

My queer feminine identity is what some people would call a “femme” identity. I do present physically as a femme but I reject the stereotypes that come with it. Being petite and an introvert, I have always had to surprise people with myself. My identity has been no different. Having once identified as bisexual, I’ve had to reject all the categorizations that coincide with sexual orientation too. I’ve been stuffed into the boxes of passive, delicate, confused, and unsure of myself when, in fact, I have always known who I am. I just never knew the person others thought I was. And although I tried to get to know this person, she has remained a stranger to me. I only know the woman who appreciates women and all things feminine; the softness, the strength, the beauty, and the courage – the things I see in myself and the things I love in others.

I may like to dress up, cover my eyes at the scary parts of movies, and am pretty bad at most sports but I am not afraid to work hard or get dirty, I am more than capable of standing up for myself, fighting for what’s right, and having fortitude in the face of adversity. Every day I become more and more comfortable with having the unpopular opinion, the unexpected identity, and standing on my own two feet when people tell me I am not who I know that I am. I may be reserved and quiet at first glance but I know what I want and I am not afraid to say it. I am 100% feminine and, despite popular opinion, this femininity is evidence that I am capable to withstand anything the world throws my way because without this capacity, people like me with a feminine experience wouldn’t even exist. Our survival is what makes us unique and also what gives us our infinite power. I am proud that as a brown, queer, feminine woman, I have inherited and earned this strength and can share my unique experience with others of the femme persuasion.

This essay was written for She Cult’s Fall 2016 E-zine. She Cult is a collective for feminine-of-center queer people based out of Emerson College.

OMG, I’m Gay!

Posted on November 1, 2016 by The Glam Femme-inist

When did you realize you were gay? That’s the question that many people who identify as queer have probably heard at least once in their lives. It’s an odd question because no one asks straight people when they realized they were straight. Nonetheless, many of us rack our brains trying to figure out the exact moment that we realized that we were attracted to the same sex. For some people it’s easy. For others, not so much. For everyone, it is a crucial tidbit of information because without this informational badge of honor, can you really consider yourself gay? People, gay and straight, are just now getting the memo that sexuality and gender are both on a spectrum and can change for each individual person throughout their lives, although it may not necessarily. Until this idea really hits home though, many of us queer people struggle to pinpoint exactly when the “gay revelation” happened to us.

To try to figure out when you knew you were gay is to assume there was a time that you didn’t know you were gay. But how can that be when people are born gay and there are some people who say that they knew they were gay from the day they were born? The reason is that this knowledge is subjective and extremely susceptible to societal norms. For example, if we don’t grow up with a context for being gay or, what’s worse, we don’t have an accurate representation of what makes a person queer, then coming to a place of realization can seem tricky. Continue reading →

Fall is Here, So What to Wear?

Posted on September 14, 2016 by The Glam Femme-inist

As New York Fashion Week 2016 (showing Spring Summer 2017) comes to a close, I’m reminded that a new season for fashion is here. Though it may still be nice out, you can feel the crisp Fall bite in the air. Time to break out the boots and layers, but don’t put away the summer dresses and tees just yet.

When I was a teenager I used to live for the extra thick back-to-school fashion issues of all my favorite magazines that came in August, in preparation for September. Now, as an adult, it’s no longer back-to-school shopping time for me, but Fall fashion is no less exciting and I still pore through magazines – and blogs, Instagram, and Pinterest, of course – looking for what pieces to add to my wardrobe for the upcoming season.

All the top fashion and lifestyle magazines, and their corresponding social media, never fail to deliver the latest trend forecasts and the masses happily follow them – sometimes without even realizing it. The only thing is, many times the examples of these trends are just a bit out of the average person’s price range since many of the looks are ripped from the runway and haven’t trickled down to mainstream retail yet.

So I decided to put together my own Fall Fashion Trend list, complete with shopping options for any budget. This list is largely based on looks that were displayed in some of the most popular designers’ Fall Winter 2016 collections, as well as all the fashion content I could get my hands on this month. Enjoy!

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Summer Fashion: Where did the time go?

Posted on July 22, 2016 by The Glam Femme-inist

If you’re anything like me, you don’t have nearly as much fun getting dressed for a regular work day as you do for the weekend or even an after-work outing. I know work clothes can be fun too, but since I’d rather spend my money on trendy or chill clothes, my work attire can be described as, at best, cute business casual. In other words, boring. Work fashion doesn’t excite me as much as everyday fashion does, especially street style, although I may not be brave enough yet to don some of the cool outfits I see and love.

But having to dress for my 9 to 5 for 5 out of 7 days in the week leaves me with the dilemma of not having enough time to experiment with new looks. Now, I’m no fashionista, but I do dabble and at least know what the trends are, even if I don’t wear them every day. In the beginning of each new season, I usually make a list of key pieces I want to get and go on Pinterest and Instagram for looks I want to try. But this summer is going by super fast! So what’s girl to do when it seems there aren’t enough days in the summer for fun, warm weather fashion?

I decided to post some of my favorite looks on here and challenge myself to execute all of them by the end of the season. Challenge accepted.

Here are the particulars:

Blue and White Porcelain Matching Set @ Cupshe

As seems to be the case every season lately, prints are in this summer. In addition, so are matching separates. With this outfit, you get two for one. I love the fringe-y sandals too. Thankfully, I have a pair already!

More prints; this time, a little bit of mix and match. My favorite part of these looks are the use of the pineapple, which also seems to be big this summer, and the tropical plants in the bold prints. As usual, the Quann sisters are killing it.

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Cultural Appropriation: What it is, What it is Not, and Why it Matters

Posted on June 15, 2016 by The Glam Femme-inist

When I first had the idea to start this blog I knew that one of my focuses would be topics that affected me as a member of the Black community in America, among other things, and at the same time balance it with not-so-heavy topics because everyone deserves to smile every once in awhile, despite all the injustices and annoyances in the world.

So here goes, my very first serious topic, cultural appropriation. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. This is such a loaded topic so we will start by breaking it down. I think we can agree that culture is a culmination of the characteristics and practices of a particular social or ethnic group and that to appropriate means to take for oneself, often without permission. Simply put, cultural appropriation is the theft of what makes a community of people unique.

In my experience, this term has most often been used to describe what mainstream-White society has done to minority or other cultures, such as Native-Americans and Black/African-Americans. We all know that White society stripped both of these communities of their cultures from their very first encounters with them hundreds of years ago. These cultures were not just erased, but many parts were stolen as well. But the usual question for people who just don’t get cultural appropriation is, “How is it happening today?”

In a bit, I’m going to use the example that irks me the most: hair. I have seen so many arguments about how a hairstyle is or is not cultural appropriation that it is clear that mainstream-White society and even minority community members oftentimes completely miss the point. Let me break it down.

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In a World Beyond My Cubicle

Posted on May 5, 2016 by The Glam Femme-inist

First off, I never would have imaged that two degrees and 30 plus years living my life I would be working from a cubicle. But that is another story, for another day. For now, let’s just chalk it up to me living in one of the most crowded cities in the world where there’s not much real estate in most buildings for even managers to have their own offices, let alone “lowly” contract workers like myself.

Anyway, the other day I was looking up at the ceiling, above my cubicle walls, and I remembered being a small child, laying on the top bunk of my and my sister’s bunk beds. I would stare at the ceiling in the dark and imagine a make believe world, all the characters that lived inside and, most importantly, their stories.

I’m not sure whether it was a way for me to escape – only God knows what I thought I was escaping from – or just that I had a crazy-active imagination. Whatever the reason, I have always made stories and I have always been very “in my head”, thinking about things and trying to figure out why they are the way that they are. It is why as a child I wanted to become a writer and as an adolescent I wanted to study psychology. My sense of justice took me in a slightly different direction, namely, law school. But I have slowly found my way back.

Words are powerful. They can be persuasive, they can cause confusion, they can create joy where there otherwise would be none, and they can demand retribution. Throughout my life words have taken me places. My words have gained me acceptance into spaces I may not have been allowed to enter and they have caused rifts in my interpersonal relationships. My lack of words when I’ve felt especially introspective has brought me to face significant changes in my life; changes that were a catalyst to me struggling to find the right words to decipher what was really going on. Those are the times that writing helped me to find these words and eventually find myself.

Whether I am thinking them, screaming them or writing them down, words have always been there for me. As I go through yet another change in my life, I have come to realize that words are my saving grace and hopefully this blog is the spring to action that I needed to create my own story. There was a reason that that little girl had so many words and ideas floating around in her head. Now, I have the opportunity to turn them outward and as I do I will continue to discover the world around me and my purpose in it.