We don't hide our unabashed love for Alicia Keys 'round here. We've celebrated her songs, her style, her activism, and how she's raising her sons as feminists. She even wrote for us, sharing her personal experiences of training for and kicking ass at the NYC marathon. And, of course, we dig her decision to go makeup-free.
But here's the thing about giving up makeup — or, say, high heels or meat or social media: It can absolutely make you a happier, more fulfilled person. Sure it can! But it does not make you a superior person to others who haven't made that choice. If you ditch something because you used to rely so heavily on that it started to mess with how you live your life, and now that you've given it up you feel so much more free/chill/content/whatever, that's really cool. But so is reintegrating that thing back into your life in a healthy way. Or not. Either way: It's totally up to you, and you only.
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Thankfully, Alicia Keys seems to know this already, as proven by her baller response when Adam Levine called her out for wearing makeup.
Levine told Howard Stern that when he spotted Keys, his co-host on The Voice, putting on "a little bit of makeup," he said, "oh, I thought Alicia doesn't wear makeup."
Keys' response? "I do what the fuck I want," she clapped back. ZING.
Because Keys doesn't subscribe to some dogmatic approach to what people should and shouldn't look like or wear or put on their faces, and neither do we. Instead, it's about beauty as you choose — just for you, on that day, at that specific moment, depending on how you feel.
"I think what happens in the world, and I think it’s part human nature and part programming, is we become an emulation of what we see," Keys told Glamour this winter. "We become clones of each other. And to break free from that and say, 'Wait, I’m deciding to be my own individual self. And it looks nothing like what anyone else is doing.' There’s something so powerful about being my own gorgeous, beautiful, individual, unique self."
And if that includes makeup on occasion: Who fucking cares? (Not, it turns out, Adam Levine. His response to Keys' clapback was "I love you so much." )