With more and more social media movements emerging to empower women to shatter unrealistic and unhealthy beauty standards imposed on them by society, Palestinian American Sarad Mahmoud decided to add her own contribution to the list.
Last week, Mahmoud, along with three other Middle Eastern women, Yara Assadi, Zainab and Zara, all self-proclaimed feminists, started the hashtag #TheHabibatiTag which started trending worldwide on Sept. 6, has since been used over 20,000 times, and is still holding strong on the Twitter charts.
The purpose of its creation was to encourage Middle Eastern and North African women and men to post photos of themselves in order to show their pride of their Middle Eastern and Arab beauty and origins.
In addition, it was also meant to challenge the Western beauty standard of the blonde, fair-skinned and blue-eyed woman extensively portrayed in mainstream media, promote diversity, and break media stereotypes about Middle Eastern and Arab women and men, as the creators stressed that the hashtag is gender neutral.
"#TheHabibatiTag is a tag started by myself and 3 other gorgeous women who are Middle Eastern. This tag is meant to be gender neutral," Mahmoud tweeted.
"And it's meant to promote pride, positivity, love and respect inside of the Arab community as well as outside. So feel free to post under it and show how prideful we are to be Middle Eastern," Mahmoud said.
And post they did, as thousands of women living both in Western countries and in the MENA region shared selfies and other photos of their faces, veils and traditional outfits, as well as their nationality or origin.