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“I grew up wanting to look like Serena van der Woodsen on Gossip Girl,” confides Shahd Batal. This was quite a challenge, since in her suburban Minneapolis town, Batal was the sole black Muslim girl in a sea of blue-eyed blondes.
But she would soon overcome her isolation, in imaginative, empowering, 21st-century ways. Batal, who is 22, has had quite a career on YouTube, first blogging about styling her natural hair and now detailing her makeup adventures as a hijab-wearing, Sudanese-American woman. “I took a break from college after my sophomore year for several reasons, but one of them was to pursue YouTube,” she says of her original decision to document herself and her hair. “I had to find a balance between doing what I loved and respecting my family at the same time.” In the beginning, she insists the videos were “awful”—her word—but there was something in her unpretentiousness, her authenticity, that appealed, and she soon amassed a huge number of followers.
Two years ago, in November 2016, Batal decided to express her faith as a Muslim woman by electing to wear a hijab. “I woke up one day and I thought, I am going to put this on. It was a huge step for me, and things were a little rough for a time.” It also meant the end of her career as a natural hair blogger; she took down all the old videos and photos with her hair showing. Now that her coiffure wasn’t a factor, she relied on cosmetics for self-expression and individuality, and her YouTube career followed suit. “I’ve always loved makeup, but I got really into it post-hijab. I’m completely self-taught, and you can see my skills get better and better in the videos. I feel like I made a whole career about not being good at things,” she laughs. “Makeup was a tool I used to be creative, boost my confidence, and discover myself.”
But recently she realized that it was never just about the makeup, just like it was never just about hair: “It’s about how I’ve grown through it.” It was, in a silent, unspoken way, a bit of a political act: “I’ve had to unlearn things, like the European standard of beauty that told me I was ugly, and define beauty for myself.… When I first started wearing the hijab, my fashion sense was terrible.… I’d always seen Muslim women dressed very feminine, lots of skirts and dresses, so I tried that, but it just wasn’t me. I like baggy pants, t-shirts, chunky boots, layering, things that aren’t typically seen in the modest fashion world.”
Now she says, “I don’t have to compromise my fashion for my hijab and I don’t have to compromise my hijab for fashion.” Batal hopes that young women—Muslim or not!—will be inspired by her videos, and her life. “I think I’m lucky to be able to be myself. I love avocado toast, I love hiking! At the end of the day, I am a totally normal first-generation American girl."