*Alicia Keys appeared on the Facebook Watch series “Red Table Talk” on Monday and spoke about why she chose to go makeup-free three years ago.
The Grammy-winning singer said she wore makeup to live up to peoples’ expectations and when she decided to go make-up free, she “didn’t even know my own face. And when I took off all the stuff and I looked into the mirror, I didn’t know that person.”
Keys went on to say how shocked she would be by older photos of herself because the contrast “was that drastic,” she explained to Red Table Talk hosts Jada Pinkett Smith, Adrienne Banfield Norris, and Willow Smith.
“I had a paper [where] I wrote down all the things that pissed me off … I’m pissed off that if I’m not so put together and I walk outside, someone says to me, ‘You look tired,” the 38-year-old singer continued, per Insider.
OTHER NEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED: The Usually Private Alicia Keys is Uncensored and Revealing on ‘Red Table Talk’ – WATCH
“I’m not tired,” she added. “I’m chilling. This is my face. But I didn’t even know that, because I didn’t even know my face. I didn’t even know my own face. And when I took off all the stuff and I looked into the mirror, I didn’t know that person.”
Keys opened up about going bare-face in an essay shared on Lenny Letter in May 2016.
“I started, more than ever, to become a chameleon,” Keys wrote. “Never fully being who I was, but constantly changing so all the ‘they’s’ would accept me.”
She said that while working on her 2016 album “Here,” she wrote a song about the pressure women face, titled “When a Girl Can’t Be Herself.”
“I was really starting to feel like that — that, as I am, I was not good enough for the world to see,” Keys said.
During a photoshoot for the album, Keys was encouraged by photographer Paolo Kudacki to rock her natural beauty.
“It was just a plain white background, me and the photographer intimately relating, me and that baseball hat and scarf and a bunch of invisible magic circulating,” she said.
“And I swear it is the strongest, most empowered, most free, and most honestly beautiful that I have ever felt.”
Watch the video above and hear Keys talk about going makeup-free at 12:50.
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