A woman in London is working on changing the perception of beauty that affects women of color. Lekia Lée is trying to encourage women to embrace their natural hair through a Billboard campaign.
According to Huffington Post, Lée created a billboard poster to embrace black women's physical features, which is displayed by UKBillboards. The billboard will be visible for two weeks in West Kensington for free.
The poster shows some black women with their natural hair while wearing traditional pattern garments featuring a hashtag #afrovisibility. She told Huffington Post that black women's textured hair is not represented enough in billboard advertising, and to address this she "chose this highly visible billboard."
Her inspiration for this campaign is that she wants to give a positive influence to her 11-year-old-daughter, Siira and other girls to "feel beautiful and confident about their unique hair texture," said Lèe. She wants her daughter not to lose her self-loving since Lèe never felt like she had a choice about her hair growing up. Lée admitted that she had the feeling of not being accepted in the society for having to straighten her natural hair.
Lée believes that if her daughter started to see straight hair as the only acceptable beauty in society, eventually she would wish to have "someone [else's] body, lips, eyes, eyelashes, talent, charisma." She explained on Project Embrace website that this is why she wanted to teach girls to love their uniqueness because "acknowledging beauty on the outside is as important as acknowledging the beauty on the inside."
The goal of Project Embrace is to make afro hair, which is the physical feature of black women to be visible in the media as beautiful hair. She wants to challenge the beauty standard by making a positive representation of textured hair as to normalize it.