ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the browning and race-ing stylization technologies like ceramic straighteners and fake tan to continue to look at Black beauty as performative. It draws on Judith Butler's idea of performative reiteration which simply stated would mean that Black beauty is a matter of doing and its effects are not therefore an inherent attribute. The chapter looks at the cultural, social, political and economic context in which browning emerged in Jamaica. It charts how the use of straighteners and fake tan by light skinned young Black British women produce beauty embodiments which are then normalized within the category Black beauty through readings of diasporic beauty knowledge on browning, translation and mimicry. The chapter looks at the position of white beauty as iconic and its reverse of closed Black beauty based on tightly ascribed ideas of naturalness is being destabilized by young Black mixed race women in Britain as they reconstruct the category browning for their 21st century context.
