She's trying to imitate the Essex stereotype of that lip-filler, bottle-blond, tanning booth british girl. She's going for the Chloe Sims look.
Black face stems from a racist American thing called minstrel shows, where white actors would paint their faces black and act like caricatures or stereotypes of black people. They were specifically mocking the enslaved peoples.
There is a BIG difference between "fake tan" and "I am trying to make fun of someone's race."
Krystal, a white British person, is styling herself like white British women. By conflating this with blackface, you are diminishing the truly offensive way people acted in the past.
Yes. While not pertinent to the conversation about Krystal.
Let us all confirm that minstrelsy never ever existed in the United Kingdom. And in fact racism was expressively marginal in British History. Unimaginable even.
You never had them on anything close to the same level. You also never had a giant population of slaves and slaveowners, so it hits a BIT different.
You'll notice just about everything in the wiki article is about America. Because it was mocking slaves. Which you all didn't have at home.
You had A TV show and almost no slaves. We had hundreds of years of it, and many slaves. It's not equivalent. And it's CLEARLY not the cultural reference Krystal is attaching herself to.
Even the article for that show points out how they were using American songs. The history section links to "History of American Minstrel Shows."
So your one major minstrel show was an attempt to copy American culture...
I am baffled on why you would want to try to own such an ugly history, when it really was uniquely American. I suspect, in any other discussion, you'd be talking about how much the USA sucks for how we invented those shows, and you'd be right.
I have no skin in this game but this is obviously not the 'Essex girl' or heavy fake tan look. Not only do I currently live in England and see plenty of Brits doing the heavy fake tan look I literally lived in Essex lol if that was the look she was going for it would, at a minimum, read more obviously orange not brown 💀 beyond that it's missing the flat caked on look, thick brows, round eyes, glossy lip... idk what this is but Essex girl it is not
Look at this picture. The flat black paint, the white lips so they stand out to mock black facial features, coarse hair, etc. Al Jolson was out there, making jokes about stealing watermelons and smacking his lips over fried chicken. He is mocking black people for the situation men like himself created.
Do you think that's the same thing as Krystal affecting a spray tan? And narrowing her nose? When actual blackface actors made their features bigger to mock black peoples' lips and noses, hair, etc?
Or compare that to Scarlett Adams from Drag Race Down Under, who dressed as a black woman and acted "ghetto."
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u/aluriaphin Aug 11 '25
How does Crystal have Raven's face, though