Complex

Alessia was an Italian-American girl who dreamed of being a model. However, the texture of her hair and her olive skin always set her apart from the blonde goddesses she looked up to. She never felt like one of them and consequently lacked the confidence needed to succeed in her career.

She had often tried a different look with lighter and straightened hair to look more like the ideal self she had in mind, but she was told it looked off on her. One day, she was contacted by a modelling agency which specialised in models with minority ethnic backgrounds. Her new agent suggested her a different approach: “Why don’t we enhance your natural beauty instead? You look slightly exotic, why not insisting on this note instead? Once you’ll be able to pass for mixed or brown, you will stand out more!”. Alessia felt slightly offended. She knew Italian Americans had long struggled to be accepted in the wider white American society and she felt like betraying her community by turning her exoticity into an advantage. I mean, sure, Ariana Grande did the same quite successfully – she told herself – she can pass for Latina and hence gain a lot in popularity, I could do the same after all. A bit reassured by her own thoughts, Alessia signed a contract binding her to some minor cosmetic readjustments and started working. Her hair was dyed jet black, even darker than her natural colour, and curled up even more, which distressed her a bit as she was already picturing herself as a Latina beauty with luscious, shiny straight black hair instead. On top of that, she also had to follow a strict tanning schedule, combined with some melanin pills. What look were they going for?

After a few weeks, Alessia looked very different, her brown skin and kinky curls suggesting a North African descent or something like that, which scared her. The melanin pills also turned her eyes completely black, giving her face an unmistakeable exotic flavour. “Oh God, I look even less like my ideal self now! Jeez, I look so dark, like one of those brown girls! And my hair looks kind of afro? That’s not what I had in mind for myself, I’ll have to hide myself from my colleagues and friends or they will make fun of me! Let’s hope it will help me for my career at least.”

She was indeed contacted to shoot some nice advertisement but something that distressed her was that they now systematically classified her as a brown model and even encouraged her to get an even deeper tan. She had to fulfil the obligations of her contract, so she went with it even if she was struggling more and more to accept her changing looks. When asked about her ethnicity, she even had to lie, saying that she was half Italian half African American to explain her name.

What troubled her even more was that people were starting to treat her differently due to her skin colour and that, instead of feeling more confident thanks to her professional success, she felt even more insecure and different from those blue-eyed blonde models she always compared herself with.

A few months later, Alessia was suggested to undergo some minor plastic surgeries to enhance her facial features, including lip fillers, cheeckbone adjustment and a touch up to her nose. She was slightly worried about them but told herself that those were probably just some classic cosmetic interventions to make her cuter.

After the surgeries, she realized that her appearance was drastically changed. Her lips, rather than looking artificially inflated looked like the natural lips of a girl of pure African descent, as well as her cheekbones. Her nose still retained some caucasian features, although it was surgically broadened. They also took the occasion to boost the melanin running in her system to a unprecedented level for a white girl.

As soon as she saw her new reflection, Alessia freaked out. She couldn’t keep on doing this any longer. She decided to rescind the contract, despite having to give up on most of her earnings, and with no savings to pay for surgeries to revert the effects of what they did to her.

However, she quickly realised that with her darker appearance, modelling was out of question so she was forced to return to the same agency, where she had to sign a contract which left her with even less control over how her looks could be enhanced.

The first surgery drastically altered the shape of her face, making it less elongated and giving her a more youthful appearance. Her nose was also heavily modified to give it an even broader shape that could be naturally found only in Sub-Saharian Africa. Nobody could mistake her for anything else then pure African-American.

On her way to the second clinic, Alessia did not even bother to check her appearance, she preferred instead to wait to see the full extent of her final transformation. She knew her identity was being taken away anyway and it was pretty clear that she would soon have the looks of a girl of pure African descend. She had struggled for so long to feel accepted as a white girl and now she was giving up to the point she let her looks be modified beyond recognition to match those of a black girl, what was the meaning of that?

The second set of surgeries included a full hair transplant to make sure that Alessia’s hair would always be either kinky or styled in dreadlocks, then her bloodstream was flooded with enzymes designed to stimulate the production of melanin in skin cells to full capacity. To make this permanent, apposite enzyme-releasers were placed under her skin. When Alessia awoke, a few days later, she was the epitome of African beauty.

To avoid any accusation of extreme black fishing, she was forced to legally change her name to Alyssa, much more acceptable for a black girl like she now was.

With her newfound blackness her life changed in many ways. People treated her with a clear racial bias, the only group which was now more friendly with her were the African Americans, who treated her as one of them, even if she didn’t feel one of them yet. She always claimed she had some Italian in her, although most people were struggling to see any trace of it given her classically African appearance. Dating also became more difficult. She was a model of course, so she always got every guy’s interest but most of the guys she dated had a black girl fetish, which she found pretty disturbing. She realised that her best options were, again, Black guys. She had to admit that making out with black guys turned her on in a special way, maybe she had always had a thing for Black guys, and also feeling her full lips agains his ones, seeing her black dreadlocks falling on her lover’s wide shoulders felt just right. She realised that these experiences deeply satisfied her submissive side, which had itself been fed by her comparisons with blonde models. She began to feel weirdly at peace with herself as a Black girl and even stopped claiming any European ancestry when introducing herself.