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This Makeup Artist Faced Racist Backlash After Going Viral As The Black Powerpuff Girl

There seems to be mixed emotions about "Bliss."

We are constantly looking for representation. And yes, as Black women, we want to see ourselves in the media just like anyone else. So, when The Powerpuff Girls revealed their fourth addition named Bliss, we were super hype to see someone brown on the popular cartoon. 

21-year-old makeup artist @amarieproctor recently shared her joy by recreating Bliss' signature look for her 11K followers. See below:

"When I first saw Bliss, I instantly loved the colors aqua and purple mixed together," Amarie exclusively shared with BET Style.

"I immediately started thinking about what makeup looks I could create. I knew that making myself look like an actual PowerPuff Girl was gonna be a bit challenging, so I took a more safer route and created a more 'wearable look,' if you will [laughs]. It’s was really fun to just play around with the makeup and I was in love with the outcome." 

Her interpretation instantly went viral with over 50K likes on social! However, despite all the positivity it was met with a ton of backlash as well. "At first, around the first 10 comments were positive. And then the picture rapidly grew attention way faster than I thought — and I received a lot of racist comments," Amarie confesses.

"Racists never crossed my mind before posting the picture, so it caught me off guard. I was genuinely so happy about there even being a Black PowerPuff and that I had done a makeup look to correspond with her. Negative feedback hadn’t even crossed my mind at all. So when I began to receive it, I instantly became disgusted and infuriated.

"I honestly just couldn’t believe that people (specifically white people), were so upset by it. As an African-American you dream of things like this you know? And when it finally happens, it becomes this controversial thing. That’s insane to me."

While the reactions were not what Amarie had in mind, there was some positive feedback.

"We had been waiting for this to happen since forever. It’s literally so pleasing to see that there’s a Black PowerPuff Girl. There was a person that DM’d me saying, 'Even though there is a lot of hate, I just want you to know that my daughter saw your post and she wants to be be Bliss for Halloween.' That literally made my heart melt, because that’s amazing to me. That women’s little girl saw a PowerPuff who looked [like her] and instantly wanted to be her. That in itself says enough for me."

Would she do it again? "I honestly didn’t even worry about the comments after that. The experience was crazy, but it was a good one. And I’m happy that I put it out there a little more by creating a makeup look, because a lot of people were still unaware that Bliss was even in existence."

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