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Here's why Alicia Keys quit wearing makeup

Lisa Ryan   

Here's why Alicia Keys quit wearing makeup
Latest2 min read

Alicia Keys

Frederick M. Brown/Getty

Alicia Keys (pictured) at the BET Awards, embracing #nomakeup

Alicia Keys showed up on the red carpet of Sunday's BET awards looking gorgeous - and completely free of makeup.

Mashable noticed that Keys' natural look fell in line with a recent essay she wrote for Lena Dunham's newsletter, Lenny Letter. In the essay, Keys wrote that she was embracing the no makeup look.

The singer wrote of her belief that makeup conceals a woman's inner truth and fosters a society in which women are focused on what others think of her. She, too, had used it as a clutch to cover her own insecurities, she wrote.

"Every time I left the house, I would be worried if I didn't put on makeup: What if someone wanted a picture?? What if they POSTED it??? These were the insecure, superficial, but honest thoughts I was thinking. And all of it, one way or another, was based too much on what other people thought of me," she wrote.

Alicia Keys

Frederick M. Brown/Getty

Keys and her husband Swizz Beatz at the BET Awards

But that all changed after the singer met photographer Paola Kudacki, who encouraged her to be shot as she was - fresh from the gym, with a scarf over her head and absolutely no makeup.

"It was just a plain white background, me and the photographer intimately relating, me and that baseball hat and scarf and a bunch of invisible magic circulating," Keys wrote. "And I swear it is the strongest, most empowered, most free, and most honestly beautiful that I have ever felt."

Once the photograph Paola took came out as the artwork for Keys' new song "In Common," the singer fully embraced the #nomakeup look.

"I hope to God it's a revolution. 'Cause I don't want to cover up anymore," Keys said. "Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing."

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