Jameela Jamil has all but made body positivity her own personal brand.
The 33-year-old actress has continually revealed the evils of weight-loss shakes and supplements (going as far as to trash the Kardashians over it) and recently launched her new Instagram TV show, ‘I Weigh Interviews,’ a spinoff of her ‘I Weigh’ social media movement.
Now, Jamil’s tackling another often-ignored (or reviled!) feature of nearly every woman’s body: stretch marks. The ‘Good Place’ actress in an Instagram post Monday morning called her boob stretch marks a “badge of honor” and described them as a “normal, beautiful thing.”
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“I have stretch marks all over my body and I hereby rename them all Babe Marks,” Jamil wrote. “They are a sign my body dared to take up extra space in a society that demands our eternal thinness. They are my badge of honour for resisting society’s weaponizing of the female form. ❤️”
The actress also voiced her disgust for skin whitening and bleaching.
“My face is white because I wear spf 100 sunscreen like a boss,” explained Jamil. “PS. LOVE YOUR BROWN SKIN. I tan responsibly but I love to tan! I love to embrace and celebrate my heritage. This skin bleaching and whitening should be banned. It’s inherently racist, classist and emotionally very damaging. #brownandproud.”
Jamil is completely right about the prevalence of stretch marks on female bodies. A 2015 study in the Journal of American Academy of Dermatology found that more than half of all pregnant women develop stretch marks their abdomen, hips, thighs, and breasts—and it’s common among women who have never been pregnant, too.
Women loved Jamil’s candidness about her body and her reframing of what’s “beautiful” and “normal”—even for celebrities.
Of course Jamil isn’t the first female celebrity to flaunt her “babe marks’ across social media. Twitter darling Chrissy Teigen posted a stretch mark photo of her thighs to Twitter in January 2017 simply captioned, “Whatevs.”
https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/821941494298726400
h/t Mashable