Chocolate is just another word for orgasmic.
Benis Arapovic / Getty Images
Ivanko Brnjakovic / Getty Images
Spectral-design / Getty Images
Sunagatov Dmitry / Getty Images
"I hope that people who look at the series would feel the positive energy of youth and the spirit of undiluted individuality." —Emily Stein
She likes food, traveling, and cool denim jumpers! All the makings of a best friend!
These barrettes just gave every black woman instant flashbacks!
Bonus: You won't wake up the next day with a rat's nest on top of your head.
The Joker wouldn't be The Joker without green hair.
Sissi / Via youtube.com
*Or your regular, everyday hair, because this stuff is FUN.
Lauren Zaser / Alice Mongkongllite / Via BuzzFeed Life
• Hair Chalk Compacts
• Hairspray
• Disposable Gloves
• Hair clips
• Water
Your hair should be dry before you start chalking.
We used Fudge Hair Color Chalk and Splat Instant Color Hair Chalk.
Lauren Zaser / Via BuzzFeed Life
She got her own lipstick and everything!
It's a two-piece collection of a lipstick and a lip gloss available January 2016. 100% of the proceeds go to the MAC AIDS Fund.
MAC Cosmetics / Via Snapchat
Hopefully the crumbs didn't screw up her color.
MAC Cosmetics / Via Snapchat
MAC Cosmetics
MAC Cosmetics
Illustrations by Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
The weirdest thing about living with your parents is having people constantly observing your every move: "Is that a second glass of wine?" "Who's calling?" "Are you going to put the cheese away?" "Why does the dog like you more than me?" "Haven't you already taken a shower today?" And on and on, world without end.
After five years in New York, I decided it was time for a change. I packed up my Williamsburg apartment and moved across the country to the little island in the Puget Sound where I was born. I had decided to go to nursing school, and I had also decided to live with my parents while I completed a year of prerequisites at the local community college. It's been four months.
I'm an only child, which means my parents are basically obsessed with me. People think that being stalked by strangers is such a big deal, when a far more insidious form of stalking is the one that happens when my mom comes and leans against my door jamb to see what I'm watching on TV and then suggests that maybe I'd like to go outside. It's a kind of stalking that has been heretofore ignored by the legal system.
The worst is actually when they don't comment, because it usually means they are too horrified to fully process my latest affront and will need time to think about it before knocking on my door three days later while I'm in the middle of an episode of The Good Wife — "Another episode?"— to say, "I've been thinking about what you said the other day."
Whenever my mom says that she's been thinking about what I said the other day, I know nothing good is coming. She'll relay some recent observation, and then share how it fits into a pattern of bad behavior she's been observing for decades but hasn't been able to fully comprehend until now, when I've finally handed her the last piece of the nasty little puzzle. If I try to argue she'll say OK in a serene way that suggests you can lead a 29-year-old to water, but you can't make her fall in love with the nice guy down the block.
My mom has become obsessed with the idea of niceness, as well as the idea that I only date "assholes." I tell her about someone I'm seeing and her first question is, "Is he nice?"
This is always asked in a tone that suggests the answer is not likely to be yes. I say yes immediately, even though, until this moment, I hadn't even considered it. Funny, smart, attractive, sure — but nice?
My mom relays the story, again, about how when her brother was dying of AIDS in the '80s he told her that he had never really cared about kindness, but could now see that it was the only thing that mattered. I liked this story, but couldn't totally see how it applied to me. Why would you want to date a nice guy when you could date someone who didn't care about you one way or the other?
The dog has recently taken a shine to me. She follows me from room to room, not unlike my parents, and stares at me with an anxious yet vacant look on her face, not unlike my parents. The only real difference between her and them is that when she does this, I love it.
I'm so much more patient with a dog who wouldn't even notice if I died than I am with my mom, whose life would end if that happened. Of course, my mom noticed that the dog had started following me around. She asked, "Why does Bella like you more than me?"
This made me wonder, Why does Bella like me more than you? And then I remembered: Can't dogs smell cancer?
Something about living with your parents is that they are getting old. Their friends are dying. Since I've been home, two peripheral but longtime friends have been diagnosed with incurable cancer. For the first time I've started to think about death in a serious way. Every time I can't think of a word — what is the other, better word for incurable cancer? — I assume it's the beginning of early-onset Alzheimer's.
My dad tells me that his friend's wife was diagnosed with the kind of brain cancer that people die from — WHAT IS THAT GODDAMN WORD — and I start to notice these two vertical wrinkles between my eyes. These lines are called "11s." I know this because I spent almost two years writing for a beauty magazine. I wonder if I would still be obsessed with these wrinkles if I didn't have a name for them. Like how cultures that don't have a name for "periwinkle" just don't see that color.
A month later my dad tells me that his friend's wife with the terminal (GOT IT) brain cancer has died. The same day, I almost veer off the road while studying my "11s" in the rearview mirror. The parallels between our lives grow stark. The parallel lines between my eyes starker still.
In the nutrition class I'm taking, I learn that women are only supposed to have one drink a day. I text my friend who is a nurse at NYU and he tells me that he's had several good-looking, educated, and well-off female patients (he uses those adjectives because he knows me) come in dying of alcohol-related organ problems. He says that these women only drank a couple glasses of wine a night. The follow-up frowny face feels pointed.
I wonder if drinking two drinks a night (and sometimes more, reader) is contributing to my "11s." I tell a friend about my "11s," and she says, "Yeah, I see them," instead of the correct thing, which is, "Are you kidding? You look 9!" Then she tells me that she gets Botox every three months. Twenty-nine years old. Botox is an arms race; as soon as someone starts getting it, we all have to. I suppose you can choose not to participate in an arms race, but would you still be able to call yourself an American?
Bella, finalist for the MacArthur Genius Grant.
Ramona Emerson
Something I have always liked about my mom is that she never talks about her looks. She never says she looks fat or asks if she looks fat or stares at herself for a long time in the mirror with her brow all squinched up, thinking about how she looks fat. My mom discourages me from doing things like buying $51 exfoliating shampoo. I try to convince her that the shampoo might be worth it: "This woman says it changed her life!"
"Yeah, it made her poor," she says.
It's weird to be around people who aren't in their twenties. They have a seizure every time their cell phones make noise, but they do seem to understand other things.
My dad eats pickled herring straight out of a jar in the refrigerator. When I try to explain to him that this is disgusting, he says, "It's just herring." This is his favorite line of reasoning. You object to something, and he responds by saying, "It's just [insert objectionable thing here]." Obviously, it's impossible to win against someone who fights this dirty.
But then I had this weird thought: Maybe it is just a herring or a wrinkle or a dog who likes you. So many of the things that consume my mind don't matter to my parents at all. In fact, the only things that do seem to matter to them are being nice, trying to do the right thing, and enjoying yourself in a way that doesn't make other people want to die. Everything else is just.
Obviously things like "being nice" are boring and offer no opportunity to buy exfoliating shampoo. But after just four months of being forcibly immersed in them, I've noticed surprising thoughts start to pop into my head, like, I don't want to kill this person for walking slowly on the sidewalk. Or, If I don't get into nursing school this year, it won't be the end of the world. Living in a small town helps — there is no one else on the sidewalk — but it seems like something else is happening, too. The going is slow, but you can go the whole way like that.
If there's one other thing that's important to my parents, it's to always get in the water. Lake, river, ocean, pool, hot, cold, night, day: As far as they're concerned, if there is a body of water, you would be well-served to be in it. In our family, John Cheever's short story "The Swimmer" isn't the story of a tragic descent into alcoholism but a description of the best day ever.
We swim off the seawall in our little town. Each time is the same. I'm up to my stomach, hemming and hawing about how cold it is, and they're halfway toward the tree-covered island across the sound.
"Get in!" they yell, and part of me hates them and wants to get out and sulk like I did when I was 16, but a bigger part of me knows that the swim is worth the shock. I duck under and come up with a yelp. The water is freezing. It feels great.
I fear the chatty barber.
For years my hair has been short, and infrequent conditioner application means it often feels dry when it grows out even slightly. But I've just had it relaxed by Wayne, in a salon in Knightsbridge, and it feels different. In the first post-relaxer wash, the water runs down rather than soaking into the afro, and when I walk out of the salon, even the wind interacts with it differently. The main thing, though, is the feeling of goodwill in my chest afterwards – something I'm not entirely accustomed to.
My previous experiences in black barbershops have been laughable, the supposed common ground of our blackness a no man's land that I walk upon with unsteady feet. My skin colour is a sort of false advertising, but how is anybody else meant to know that? People see black, or mixed race, or Asian, or Hispanic, and suddenly you must know about this and understand that. The last time a barber said something to me, using Jamaican slang I'd never heard, I didn't understand and so I laughed nervously. It turns out laughing at a man who hasn't seen his wife in seven months is frowned upon. Go figure.
There is a long list of things I haven't done, or hadn't done until recently. Many black men might be accustomed to fortnightly trips to the barber's to give them a crisp lineup. They've probably been doing this since toddlerhood. Adorable as I was as a toddler, I didn't have my first fade until February. That's February 2015. Next up: plantain. I genuinely thought this was some sort of inedible plant. Turns out it looks like a banana but doesn't taste like one. I still don't really know the difference, much to the chagrin of my black friends, and I definitely don't know how to say it. My best friend tells me it's pronounced like mountain and fountain, but I have no authority on whether that is correct. At 21, curry goat has only just tickled my taste buds. I have never owned an afro comb. They don't give a masterclass on how to be black, but if they did, I would be graduating with nothing more than an under-conditioned knot to call hair.
Ben with his mum in XXXXX 2014.
Ben Henry
The extent of my black cultural knowledge is predominantly mined from pop culture. Nailing a Nicki Minaj verse, word perfect, is the best measure of my blackness I can muster. That's pretty feeble in the grand scheme of things. I was raised by white people, in a white town, in a white school, with white friends. In five separate year groups at school, you could count the black people on two hands. Black was something I knew I was and yet something I had never really pursued, both out of circumstances on the ground and also out of wilful ignorance. I was happy to ignore an entire side of my identity and move with the ebb and flow of the white life I had been happily leading.
I didn't realise how big an impact going to university in Manchester would have on me. Now I was 200 miles away from home, and there were a lot of firsts: living in my own place, buying my own food, paying my own bills. But the biggest first of all, I was encountering a life that wasn't just white. It didn't creep up on me; it threw itself in my face, countering the preceding 18 years of obliviousness. Suddenly I had black friends.
I finally began to learn that there was more to being black than knowing a Nicki verse, and how incomplete my knowledge of being black actually was. My new friends talked about their home lives and their personal routines ("creaming" their skin every day, something I did once a week if I remembered). Suddenly there were nights out to attend where there were more than two black people in the club. Sometimes there were nights where the club was 90% black. In Peterborough, you could gather the entire population of young black people and just about fill a small club. And in Spalding, the market town I lived in for the first six years of my life? I may as well have been Jesus.
For almost 20 years I had a shaved head, just like my dad. My relationship with him can be summed up in a paragraph, but probably a lot less. My mum says I look like him, but there are other things I've inherited from him, like my height, and a degree of vanity. He's a professional bodybuilder, and his present to me on my fifth birthday was a signed topless picture of himself. Lucky me. I'm not quite that vain, but I sure do love a mirror. Thankfully, I am more my mother's son, temperament-wise. I only remember him as a bully. The most concise way to sum him up was his belief that my mum picking me up and cuddling me as a baby would turn me gay. He believed in a stricter method of upbringing, something he learned from his own father. My first memory of my dad is being 3 years old and so scared of him I wet myself. My punishment was a slap to the side of my head and, coming as it did from someone 10 times my size, it hurt.
Where my friends aspired to be like their fathers, I feared becoming like mine. At 21, that fear perches lightly on my shoulder, a bird unwilling to take flight.
I put my willingness to stay oblivious to my black identity largely down to him. I haven't had any contact with my black family in six years, a choice I made to stop them wandering in and out of my life as it suited them. I have no regret or desire for it to be any other way and on my side at least, that door is currently very firmly closed. But the absence of my black family in my life has had an impact on how I identify with being black. My dad may not deserve a paragraph in the book of my life, but our relationship – or lack thereof – is one of the elements at the core of my identity, whether I like it or not. My experience with my black family runs concurrently with how I identify with being black. Which is to say I have shied away from it.
Ben Henry
In that regard, my hair has been key. For the first six years of my life, it was pretty much just my mother, a white woman with Irish heritage, and me, her mixed-race son. When I was very small, I would get out of the bath and wrap a towel around my head, because that's what my mum did. My mum, with her straight blonde hair, is the person who at my request buzzed away my nascent curls until the day I left home at 18.
The only experimentation occurred when I was about 7 years old, when my black grandma put my slightly grown-out hair into two-strand twists. They pulled so tight I got a tension headache. I shaved my head soon after. I haven't looked to change my hair, much the same as I haven't looked to explore my blackness, and I've been OK with both for a while.
Now I live in London, another cultural cauldron, and every day presents an opportunity to go out and discover parts of my identity that I have been otherwise ignoring. There's the chance for me to acquaint myself with the food I've been missing, the music that goes beyond Queen Nicki, the slang that'll help me relax around the chatty barber. It's pretty exciting. But for now I'll start with the hair.
Ben had his hair relaxed by Wayne Shorter-Campbell at Errol Douglas in London.
