Written By: Ashley Abdul
In our current day and age we continue to see women who look, sound, and dream like us. For our most recent Brown Gyal Boss feature, we connected with Sarita Nauth, a Indo-Caribbean beauty influencer and social media manager.
Growing up, Sarita shared that she never felt an embrace toward her brown skin as she left Guyana at a very young age. She was raised in a predominantly Spanish speaking town in Belize so she never “saw herself” while growing up. Nonetheless, for Sarita living away from her home country did not strip her of her birthright of being Indo-Caribbean and understanding how this impacts her identity..
Years later, Sarita decided to move to New York, which we know, has one of the highest populations of Indo-Caribbeans across Canada and the United States. This offered a major culture shock to her regarding her own cultural community.
“The vibrancy of my people on Liberty Avenue and Queens Village was something I was so thrilled to see. Being enveloped with the food, sweets, traditions of my people so far from our home felt right because it is an inherent part of who I am. While it took me many years to celebrate what it truly meant to be West Indian, I’ve been learning more about my culture and it helps me embrace the parts of me I never understood growing up…”
Sarita’s passion for design and fashion stemmed from wanting to make her grandmother proud and share her work with her before she passed, as her grandmother was a seamstress in Guyana. In 2014 she began interning with VH1 and worked her way up to Senior Social Media Manager. During that time, Sarita was creating short form content for shows and platforms like America’s Next Top Model and then branched off into creating long-form content for her own digital series like VH1’s Black Girl Beauty and their Heritage Month Group Chats.
These projects inspired her to head back to school to learn production and cinematography full-time. With her cultural identity being such an important part of her personal and professional life, Sarita emphasises her commitment to implementing her Caribbean culture into many aspects of this national platform. This passion helped start one of her major shoots at VH1 for Caribbean American Heritage Month in 2022, featuring the Queen of Dancehall, Spice and Love & Hip Hop Atlanta’s Karlie Redd.
“I was so proud to see such amazing feedback from that project that it just led me to produce more content featuring Caribbean bred artists like Rihanna, Shenseea, Koffee, and more to ensure we’re making strides to move the culture forward.”
Within her mainstream work, one of the most amazing elements is her confidence to identify as an Indo-Caribbean beauty influencer. Over the years, Indo-Caribbean women have slowly been more willing to identify themselves as Indo-Caribbean, but in many ways, the term is still finding its way into the forefront. Sarita taking the step to identify as such, contributes to embodying self-esteem and wellbeing. She shared that Caribbean Collective Magazine had contributed to her awareness around what this word meant to her. Being able to define her Indian and Caribbean ancestry represented the diversity she also knew was within her.
“The term has allowed for me to sit in a space of solidarity with who I am, as I struggled to find my footing in my community for years. Identifying as an Indo-Caribbean Influencer allows for MY people, who’ve been vastly unrepresented in Media & Entertainment, to know that I am here representing us–where we come from, our roots, beauty of our land and heritage, and firmly plant our existence in spaces we have been excluded in because we’ve been cateorganized as largely Afro-Caribbean or South Asian/Desi.”
Her small but mighty action of identifying as Indo-Caribbean, gives us the platforms to use our voice and share our talents— talents that go far beyond spreading awareness of lack of representation but using this to enhance our personalized skills as powerful women. With her honesty, Sarita shared that for many years, opportunities of representation in the beauty space were hard for her. Her ideas of beauty were heavily impacted by her Indo-Caribbean upbringing. She shared that growing up Indo-Caribbean, you’re told makeup was a thing of “maturity” and the likes of “wayward women” while also not being shown that self-love is just as important if you choose to embrace your natural features.
“I’ve always found that beauty was a way to express myself through makeup and skincare when it was always my confidence that shined brighter than illusion of having a mask.” - she shared.
With thousands of digital supporters, and the ability to be engaged and connected with the beauty industry across North America, she said that getting invites to the right rooms, maintaining the right connections, and acquiring/sustaining paid brand deals was something that she is grateful to have the knowledge to know how to achieve but wasn’t an easy task always.
“To elevate in a highly saturated industry, you had to be “gimicky” and I was far from it. It's one of the reasons why I believe my growth was slow was because I remained true to my authentic self and I didn’t stray from it. Eventually, the confidence I built from being on camera for years helped me secure other opportunities that aligned with me being just that, “ME.”
Being a beauty influencer has allowed Sarita to be unapologetically herself, she explains, and she can represent herself more authentically and genuinely. She shared that she never allowed the pressures of social media to impact her to hide her flaws or express herself less. The impact of her Indo-Caribbean beauty, both inside and out, have been her secret superpower to inspire women everywhere.