Middle Easterners and North Africans Use #TheHabibatiTag Hashtag to Challenge Western Beauty Standards

By Dina Hashish On Sep 13, 2015

If you came across stunning women on Twitter this week, it must have been Middle Eastern and North African women celebrating their beauty while challenging dominant standards.

Palestinian American Sara Mahmoud along with three other women started the already trending gender neutral #TheHabibatiTag hashtag to celebrate ethnicity and promote pride and positivity amongst the Arab community.

Sara Mahmoud felt that the Middle Easterns and North Africans never get enough representation in American pop culture and media, which made her feel unpretty as she didn’t have the stereotypical skinny blonde with blue eyes “beautiful” look.

The hashtag started on Sept. 5 and now has more than 20,000 uses of the phrase on social media. It is an incredibly empowering initiative with such a positive message, which is that beauty lies in diversity.

WE SAID THIS: Don’t miss Evolution of Egyptian Beauty from 1930 to 2015.