What is your Ethnic makeup? 

Is it the redness of your lips that speak the words of roots and origin? 

Or is it the way your eyelashes curl, accenting your eyes to understand the accents of your homeland?

Is it in the way you powder your face with lies and society’s attempts to cover up blemishes, putting up a facade; caked with imperfection? 

Genetically influenced is it in American culture to feel beautiful with petty attributes infiltrated by mass media, questioning girls as young as 12: Why don’t you look like barbie? 

What is your Ethnic makeup, you say? 

It is not found in the foundation that women wear on their faces because true foundation is found in heritage, true roots of home come from ancestral ties, stories of past generations that carry with them tails of courage and sacrifice. 

And what strengthens us is not the water proof eyeliner, 24 hour long lasting generic lip staining materialized substances, but the strength of 4 generations wiping every tear of struggle, walking side by side through fields of labor and hard work. 

So heres the things about makeup ~ 

Its make-believe because it makes you make up lies about who you really are, 

which is not the cover girl on every magazine or movie scene. Not the girl who constantly reads tween weekly, or Seventeen to feel good about herself.

It is the girl who doesn’t need mass media influence to tell her where she’s from. The girl who understands, comprehends, and appreciates who she is, and the backgrounds that have shaped her beauty. 

So the next time you ask whats my ethnic makeup, I’ll say: I don’t have any because ethnicity isn’t just something you can make up.