“In writing this memoir, I realized the impact that experience had on my own view of beauty,” she says. “And my own self-acceptance of being a pretty brown-skinned little girl growing up in Iowa. I thought I was beautiful because my mother said it and my family said it, but the world told me something different.” She lets that sit. “So to now be a face for Estée Lauder, it’s kind of ironic, because I didn’t feel beautiful until Black Hollywood said I was beautiful.”
That an entire generation of Black women found a reflection of Black beauty in Nia Long while Long herself was still waiting to see it tells us something about how beauty standards work, and how much labor goes into transforming them. Nineties Fine, after all, did not emerge from a vacuum. It was a corrective, Black Hollywood’s answer to a century of the larger industry rendering Black women invisible or, worse, making us visible in ways that were wholly out of our control. Long’s most iconic characters—and indeed, Long herself—reflected a new idea of beauty, of the Black leading lady, expansive in some ways and still restrictive in others. Now, some 30 years on, Long embodies a new facet of being a Black woman in Hollywood.
“Black don’t crack” gets lobbed at Black women constantly, ostensibly as a compliment, but one that sometimes erases the very real pressure that comes with aging—especially aging on a public stage, especially when people have a particular image of you stored in amber.
But Long is not interested in pretending that the body is not a thing that transforms. “I’m 55. I got hormonal stuff going. Your body shifts, changes. It’s a whole new body.” She is not wistful about this. She also ate the truffle parmesan fries and does not appear remotely conflicted about it. She mentions the coming press tour for Michael, how she wants to be in beautiful gowns but she also wants French fries.
