Why “Smell Urself” Is the Antidote to Colonized Beauty Standards
“Black don’t crack” was never a denial of aging or growing older.
It was a declaration of pride. Someone told one of my clients that "Black may not crack on the outside, but it can on the inside." The 1st time I heard this, it bothered me. However, the more I lived, I understand that in order for Black not to crack, we must take care of and honor our melanin.
Before beauty was turned into youth, thinness, and palatability, Black glamour was sensory. It was ritual. It was movement. It was scent. It was adornment done for oneself first.
Black women did not preserve themselves by chasing youth.
They preserved themselves through presence, routine, and ritual.
Somewhere along the way, colonized beauty standards reframed care as vanity and self-devotion as excess. Women were taught to be visually pleasing instead of sensorially rooted, self possessed or embodied. Women were taught to be consumable instead of sovereign. To be picked instead of choosing themselves.
That disconnection came at a cost.
When beauty becomes external, women learn to look at themselves instead of feeling themselves. Instead of smelling themselves. This starts when we see young girls transition into preteen hood and she starts to smell herself, which is what we say in the South and have said for centuries. She starts to smell herself but isn't encouraged to keep smelling herself. Infantilization thrives in that gap, training women to seek approval, instruction, and permission rather than trusting their own internal signals and intuition. Rather than trusting their own scent and senses.
This is where “Smell Urself” comes in.
Not as ego.
Not as arrogance.
But as self-recognition.
To smell yourself is to recognize your own presence and power before the world mirrors it back. It is to be validated internally rather than externally. It is devotion, not display.
Black glamour, I believe, has always understood this.
Scent was never an afterthought.
Movement was never optional.
Adornment was never for validation.
These practices, scent, movement and adornment, regulated the nervous system long before we had language for it. These practices created rhythm and balance in a world that demanded/demands constant labor. These practices preserved dignity in environments designed to exploit and extract.
When we lose these practices, we don’t just lose beauty, we lose regulation, our Black starts to crack, create conditions and illnesses.
This is why so many modern wellness practices feel hollow. They focus on appearance, optimization, or performance while ignoring sensation,intuition, presence, and self-recognition. The more I have listened to and paid attention to my body the better I have been able to advocate for myself. I know when my cortisol is high and my iron is low. I know when I need more magnesium than iron.
You can’t heal a body you’re still performing pick me antics with. You can't heal a body you're still accepting colonized beauty standards with.
“Smell Urself” is a return to that inner knowing. A reminder that care is not something you earn after productivity. It is how you remain intact within it.
This is not about nostalgia.
It is about infrastructure.
Your body is a temple.
A woman who recognizes herself does not need constant validation.
A woman who is sensorially rooted does not fracture under pressure.
A woman who practices self- devotion does not confuse urgency with importance.
Presence ages better than youth ever could.
And that has always been the quiet power of Black glamour and Black not cracking.
This work is not about being seen or validated.
This work is about knowing yourself deeply enough that being seen becomes optional.
Happy 100th Black History Month
Much love,
madam curtisha johnson