Kim Kardashian announced her new beauty line last week but came under fire after people noticed that she looked a few shades darker in her promo photos. Some assumed she had finally sucked all the blackness out of Kanye West, or maybe it was just photo editing gone bad. By “some” I mean myself, of course, and those on social media.
“Black women get told to lighten meanwhile Kim spends her entire career in perpetual black face and is lauded for her beauty,” one Twitter user wrote.
But unlike her sisters, who don’t offer any explanation when it comes to their innate ability to leech off blackness, Kardashian explained what was going on in the photo in an interview with the New York Times.
“I would obviously never want to offend anyone. I used an amazing photographer and a team of people. I was really tan when we shot the images, and it might be that the contrast was off,” she said. “But I showed the image to many people, to many in the business. No one brought that to our attention. No one mentioned it.”
“Of course, I have the utmost respect for why people might feel the way they did. But we made the necessary changes to that photo and the rest of the photos. We saw the problem, and we adapted and changed right away. Definitely I have learned from it,” she added.
Kardashian’s beauty line launches Wednesday, and it’ll be interesting to see all of the people flock to the site to purchase overpriced products they could probably get from CVS.