Something I need to get off my chest..

^{Melodie Monrose – Vogue Japan}

For the last couple of days I’ve been down, sad, not myself and just utterly out of everything. One of the reasons being: I work a lot, I have my dreams that I want to fulfill and in order to fulfill them I have to work hard. Simple as is.

But the biggest reason must be because of what happened after I uploaded a video called:
“Christmas has been REMIXED!”

Now, I’m pretty sure everyone knows what video I’m talking about now. And I’ve been going back and forth on whether I wanted tell you guys my part or just silence..
I talked about this with a very close friend of mine, and his advice was to “let it rest”.

A very known fact about me is that I’m a feelings-person. Whatever the situation, most of the times my heart makes all of the decisions and not my brains.

And that’s exactly why I’m writing this, tonight, for all of you that are interested in hearing my part of the story.
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It all started weeks ago when I was browsing on my Instagram, and saw that the crazy talented makeup artist Alex Box had created a stunning picture with 2 girls (same model) one painted as a white doll, and the other as a black doll.

I loved everything about it. I loved the contrast in colors and how Alex transformed the same model from one look to another. It takes a lot of work to do something like that and I just had so much respect for Alex. Racism never occurred to me. Ever.

Then a about a week later my dear friend  JF texted me this same image and asked me to do a collaboration on it. We would both do a recreation of the image, one being the black doll and the other the white. Again, Racism never occurred to me.

If there’s one thing you need to know about me it’s that I’m everything but racist.
I love people with a different color and different appearances, I get fascinated by it.
I love different ethnicities. In fact, my first ever best friend was an Asian girl.

When I receive a callsheet for a shoot I work on, I jump in the air when I see we’re having a dark-skinned model. These people are the most fun to do makeup on, and have a good time with while doing all of it.

This might be because here in Holland we have a mixture of all the people you can think of. We have about every skin color here. Even orange ;)
And growing up as a kid, I never had any problems with people different than me.

Conclusion: I love people with a different color. I think it’s the most beautiful thing ever.
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So I film my part for the collab with JF, and I’m loving every second of it. Dabbing that white paint on, it just felt as if I was transforming myself into this beautiful white doll.
Now JF already had sent me his version of his look, and I loved it.

This entire time I had NO idea Illamasqua got extreme loads of hate for this campaign.
Somehow, I had never seen an article on beauty blogs, twitter or facebook on how people hated this campaign. I had no idea. And I swear to my mother, I really have never seen an article on it, ’till after uploading my video.

I upload the video, and 2 minutes later I get my first “hate” comment. Nothing new, I’m used to people not liking my videos all the time. But as time passes, the hate got extreme. People telling me they lost all respect for me, because I was promoting: “Blackface”.

Some of you will call me a fake-lying-asshole for saying this… But my entire life I had never heard of Blackface, nor what it did to the dark-skinned-people community.

People were devastated, disappointed and angry with me. People called me a racist.
And this broke my heart. I’ve always had an amazing connection with my subscribers, I love them. And reading comments like that just snapped me.

I started searching what Blackface was all about and it was never my intention to hurt any of you. Ever. Therefore, I again, want to apologize for hurting any of your feelings.

As you might have noticed, I took my video down.

I know some of you have lost all respect for me, but I hope that with this blogpost, my part in all of this is a little bit more clear. And from the bottom of my heart, please forgive me..
It was never my intention to hurt your feelings and I’m truly sorry for that.

Thank you for reading,
Nikkie