Beauty Buzz Spotlight: YouTuber Molly Burke on Beauty and Being Blind

In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (or GAAD) on May 20th, I wanted to to shed the spotlight and some love on one of my favorite lifestyle (with beauty content) YouTubers, Molly Burke. Molly is a blind woman diagnosed with the eye disease retinitis pigmentosa before the age of six and had lost nearly all of her vision by age 16. Using her social media platform, she creates content discussing her personal experience with blindness , answering questions about disability and dispelling common myths. and also just documenting how she lives her life, including her major love of fashion and, yes, beauty products. In fact, one of my favorite videos she has ever created is "I'm Blind but Still LOVE Makeup and Tattoos" in which she talks about her draw to makeup and fashion, home decor, and a lot of other things we would consider visual but how she still appreciates them as a blind person. Check it out here.

Molly has been quite vocal in her content about how just because she can't see, doesn't mean she doesn't have a love for aesthetics. Beauty is such a multi-sensory experience. From the silky, smooth comfortable feel of a lipgloss to the relaxing sound of a frothing bubble bath to the smell of your favorite shampoo, I am sure we can all relate to these nonvisual aspects of beauty, and by no means should the blind community be excluded from enjoying the art form i they so choose. Last year, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Molly made another excellent video discussing some companies that are making efforts to be more universal and inclusive in their packaging and product making to people with all manner of disability, including the visually impaired and blind. In the video, she talks about challenges with beauty products she faces or that others with disabilities like hers and not may face in trying to use them. She offers both praise for innovations as well as constructive feedback on how they could be further improved, and I thought her take was fascinating You can find the video here.

As a fellow disabled woman and beauty lover myself, I find her thoughts shared in these videos and all of her other content both relatable and illuminating in introducing me to thoughts about living with disability, accessibility and beauty. But her bubbly personality and honest, heartfelt sharing of her thoughts on topics like , mental health, self-acceptance, and self-care is truly, truly inspiring. I highly recommend giving both this video and the rest of her channel (beauty videos and otherwise) a try.