ABSTRACT
Through the words of Black British women this chapter explores the anatomical economy of Black beauty in order to show that, beauty is about outsideness, in a context in which beauty as visible, as inscribed on the body's surface, matters. Black beauty is about aesthetics as much as it is about politics and it is not whiteness which is privileged as hair styling is about a cut-and-mix approach to beauty. The chapter suggests that Lorna's talk makes us pause to notice the performative potentiality of the sayings beauty comes from within, beauty is only skin deep and beauty is in the eye of the beholder in terms of subjectivation and agency. The performance of beauty as difference from beauty comes from within leads us to begin to think about the play of seduction, societal melancholia and agency in women's lives. Racialization makes us see beauty as related to surface, as being about stylization and performativity.
