"The Friend Who Taught Me What Beauty Actually Means"
Every year, my friend Winnie throws one of the most stunning events I've ever had the privilege of standing inside for the Culture For Change Foundation. An art installation fashion show, built to raise money for causes close to her heart, and built on one simple, radical idea: beauty doesn't have a single look, a single size, a single culture, or a single story.
I didn't know how much I needed to see that until the night I actually did.
Winnie has this gift. She pulls women out of the shadows of not enough — their art, their bodies, their stories, all of it and she puts them center stage, under real lights, in front of a real crowd, and says, without ever needing the words: you are the art. Watching her show for the first time cracked something open in me that I didn't even know was sealed shut. I had spent most of my life measuring beauty against one narrow ruler. Winnie's runway throws the ruler out entirely. It's sculpture. It's color that doesn't apologize for itself. It's culture pulled from every corner of the world, stitched together on one stage. It's bodies of every shape wearing something bold instead of something safe, and nobody flinching.
One conversation with Winnie changed how I think about my own body more than almost anything else in my adult life. She told me that in her culture, in the part of Africa she's from, being thin was never something to aspire to. Thin meant you were poor. Thin meant you didn't have enough to eat, didn't have the resources, didn't have the security that comes with abundance. Being plump, being full-figured, having curves and softness — that was the mark of wealth. That was luxury. That was a body that told the world, without saying a word, I have enough. I am cared for. I am not lacking.
I sat with that for a long time after she told me. My whole life, in the culture I grew up in, thinness was the goal. The tighter, the smaller, the more disciplined your body appeared, the more praise it earned you. I had internalized that so deeply I never even questioned where it came from or who decided it. And here was my friend, describing an entire culture where the exact opposite was true — where the very body I'd been taught to shrink was, somewhere else on this planet, considered the picture of prosperity and beauty. It wasn't just eye-opening. It rearranged something in me. Beauty standards, I realized in that moment, were never truth. They were geography. They were economics. They were stories a culture tells itself, and every culture tells a different one.
If a body type can be shameful in one place and celebrated in another, then the shame was never really about the body at all.
Winnie taught me something else, too, something quieter but just as important. She never rushes. Sit with her for an hour and you will not once see her check the time, glance at her phone to see when it's time to leave, or start mentally packing up before the conversation is actually finished. That unhurried presence is part of who she is, part of the culture she comes from — you are wherever you are, fully, and the next thing can wait until it's actually time for the next thing. Time with her simply passes. Nobody's guarding it. Nobody's rationing it like it might run out. You just enjoy the person in front of you, and somehow that's enough, and somehow it's everything.
I notice how rare that is now. I notice how often I catch myself doing the opposite — half in a room, half already thinking about the next thing on my list, treating time like a resource to be managed instead of a gift to be spent. Winnie doesn't live that way, and being around her has slowly, quietly taught me to put my phone down and actually be somewhere. To let a conversation breathe instead of watching the clock behind it.
Our friendship has always been rooted in service. Showing up for each other, yes, but more than that showing up for other women who need somebody to remind them they're allowed to take up space and own their worth exactly as they are. Winnie does that from a stage, under lights, in front of a crowd. I try to do it from my chair, one haircut at a time, one honest conversation at a time, one woman at a time who walks in not feeling like enough and walks out remembering that she always was.
Being close to Winnie's work has changed how I see beauty altogether, and it's changed how I see my own. I used to think beauty was something fixed. A target you either hit or missed. A standard set somewhere far away by people who would never actually meet you, judging you against a version of yourself you were never supposed to become. Now I know better. Beauty isn't fixed. It's not universal. It's not even mostly biological — it's cultural, it's inherited, and most importantly, it's something you get to define for yourself, the same way Winnie helps a room full of women redefine it, together, every single year.
If you've spent your life measuring yourself against a ruler you never chose, I want you to ask, the way I finally did: whose ruler is this? Who decided? And what would happen if you set it down?
You get to decide what beautiful means for you. You get to decide what worth looks like in your own body, on your own timeline, in your own culture or somewhere entirely outside of it. Winnie showed me that. I hope, in some small way, this post does the same for you.
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