“And if, for decades, fair-skinned women with Anglo-Saxon features are deemed “Most Beautiful” by a national publication, don’t we collectively, to some extent, absorb this information as truth? Even the black women on this list — Beyoncé and Halle Berry — have very light skin tones. Thick lips and wide noses — long considered “ugly” by the Western world — are excluded, thereby reinforcing the idea that they could never be “beautiful.”

-Dodai Stewart