Melanin Beauty Awards 2025: Rituals We Keep
With the much-anticipated arrival of the 2025 Melanin Beauty Awards, it’s the perfect time to pause, reflect, and show ourselves love. This year’s theme, Glow Deeper, invites us to not only celebrate the best in beauty, but to practice self-love and reconnect within. Beautifying rituals—whether a spa facial, massage, glam beat, or hair treatment—nourish more than appearance. These moments are grounding. To care is to connect—because beauty, inside and out, is intertwined.
“If you feel grounded, if you feel centered, if you feel well—your skin is going to look good, your body is going to look good, you’ll love yourself more,” says Khadija Tudor, founder of Life Wellness Center in Brooklyn, New York.
These women are healers, entrepreneurs, and community pillars who understand that the practice of caring for oneself and celebrating beauty is steeped in rich tradition. “The capacity for Black women to honor our beauty is ancestral,” says Toni Blackman, hip-hop ambassador and wellness practitioner. “It’s in our DNA to adorn ourselves. We were raised to care for our hair, to care for our appearance, and we know how important it is to remind each other.”
Nicole Grant, founder of The Healthy Hair Loft, offers a sanctuary for healthy hair, ritual, and community. For the Brooklyn-based salon owner, every client who graces her chair experiences a space of care and connection. “I do believe that this is ministry for me, so it’s definitely more than just the hair,” Grant shares. “It’s about us as women and how we take care of ourselves.”
Growing up between Guyana and New York, Khadija Tudor’s confidence was hard-won. She learned to love and appreciate her beauty after years of being judged for her skin tone. “My skin would be deep, beautiful dark chocolate. And I would go to school and be ridiculed and fight with people because my skin was dark,” Tudor says. “I didn’t believe that I was beautiful. No matter how much I was told by my family and my community, I felt like I was not enough.”
Through massage, Tudor discovered that touch could be healing. “There was something about massage. The way that when you touch your own face, it made me connect to my own beauty.”
“I encourage Black women to stand in the mirror and gaze at yourself and love yourself on purpose. It creates the beauty that you see, and then the world sees.”
Khadija Tudor, founder of Life Wellness Center
Creating Time For Self-Care
Uplifting others is at the heart of what these women do. Joanny Jimenez, founder of Everything Soulful, curates spaces for reflection, meditation, and renewal—a moment to breathe, rituals supported by sound healing, incense, and oils to calm the nervous system. “It’s very important for us, people of color, to take the time for ourselves and take a pause,” says Jimenez. “Because when we stop and we pause and we breathe, that is power.”
“Confidence is beauty. Self-love is the seed of where your confidence comes from, how you carry yourself, and the energy that you exude. If you feel good from the inside, it shows on the outside.”
Joanny Jimenez, founder of Everything Soulful
Toni Blackman learned firsthand what happens when we neglect self-care. She began embracing wellness practices out of necessity, after suffering from severe burnout in 2016. It was then that her mindset shifted, “I decided I want to be alive. I wanted to glow again.”
“I was entrenched in this strong Black woman syndrome. I suffered from it for most of my life,” Blackman reflects. Today, she nurtures her entire being—mind, body, and spirit. From rethinking her diet to embracing a more active lifestyle, this chapter has been truly transformative. “Taking better care of myself has led me on a path to loving myself more deeply.”
Through this journey, Blackman discovered that caring for herself goes hand in hand with celebrating and uplifting others. “One of the gifts that Black women are here on Earth to do is to celebrate,” she says, “and by God, we’d better start with celebrating each other first.”
Melanin Beauty Awards 2025: Rituals We Keep was originally published on hellobeautiful.com
