For years, Kadeeja Khan edited every photo before uploading it to Instagram. She started getting acne in secondary school, and the nicknames followed her long after — “pizza face”, “ugly”, “dirty”, “bacteria face”. Khan, a British model and makeup artist of Afghan origin, also lives with a hormonal imbalance and polycystic ovary syndrome, which make her skin prone to acne. In 2016, she became known online as “emeraldxbeauty”, with flawless makeup looks and skin polished in Photoshop.
In 2017, she got tired of pretending she was perfect. She stopped retouching her photos and showed her cystic acne as it was, knowing that the trolls would reopen the wounds from secondary school. They did — but the opposite of what she feared happened: her community grew to more than 370 thousand followers, according to the figure published at the time.
In 2018, she says, an agency wrote to her on the day of a shoot saying that L’Oréal couldn’t work with people with “skin problems”. L’Oréal attributed it to a casting error by the agency and said it works with all skin types.
Today, she describes herself as a skin activist and says her acne is now her norm — the skin she once edited out of every photo is now the one she shows.
