Most parents will tell you the moment you meet your baby for the first time is nothing short of inredible. Staring into their tiny little face and seeing yourself — or your partner — in their eyes is pretty much … well, magic. The last thing you'd probably do in that moment of love and euphoria is make a critical comment on the baby's appearance — right? That is, unless you're Bianca Prince, the YouTube-famous mom who recently gave birth to a daughter, Nova Grace Prince, and had some less than positive things to say about her appearance — just moments after the little girl was born.
Bianca and her husband Damien run the Prince Family YouTube channel, which recently shared Nova's birth video and drew some unexpected backlash.
The moment that has viewers up in arms begins when Bianca asks a nurse in the hospital room, "When do they get their eye color? Like, six to 12 months?"
When the nurse tells her that if the baby is born with dark eyes, they'll likely have dark eyes forever, the mom appears a bit bummed before saying to her daughter, "I thought you were going to have pretty eyes."
(Oof.)
"She do have pretty eyes," Damien jumps in to say.
But even so, YouTube viewers were put off that the child's mother could make a critique about her appearance immediately following her birth.
And it doesn't just end there. "Do you think she'll be DJ's color or a little bit darker?" the mom then asks the nurse.
(DJ, according to BuzzFeed, is one of Bianca's other children.)
"No, she's going to be darker," Damien says — to which the nurse interjects: "But she's beautiful."
It's that same reminder — that the newborn is beautiful, no matter what color skin or eyes she has — that many across YouTube and Twitter have found themselves shouting, too.
Almost immediately, people fired back in response, calling Bianca out for her "colorist" comments.
"As someone who grew up with colorist family members (and developed a complex that took YEARS to undo as a result) the whole Prince family thing boils my blood," tweeted one person.
"Imagine being 1 hour old and your parents are obsessing over your skin/eye color," wrote another. "The nurse had to remind them that she’s a beautiful baby …"
“What’s with Bianca hate’n the possibility that her daughter could take on her father’s skin tone?" another person wrote in the YouTube comments.
On June 4, the couple filmed a response video to the backlash, in which they attempted to apologize to fans and clarify Bianca's comments.
“We want to give an apology to all our fans … because there’s a lot of disheartening stuff that’s going around, that’s being said about us that’s absolutely not true," Damien says in the video.
However, as the video continues on, many are now saying it achieves the exact opposite of its goal.
"I guess we’re ‘colorist’ now?” Damien says to his wife, before telling fans, “At the end of the day, don’t ever judge a book by its color. A lot of people was judging us off a 30-second video … without even watching the full video or knowing who we is.”
Then Bianca jumps in to explain herself -- which kinda sorta backfired, depending on who you ask.
“People are going around saying that I don’t love my daughter because I said she doesn’t have pretty eyes,” Bianca begins. (Which, to be fair, is a pretty extreme comment — even if you don't agree with what she said, it's not a sign that she doesn't love her daughter.)
“In the video I was looking at her and I said … I was talking to the nurse and the nurse was like, ‘If they’re dark right now, they’re always going to stay dark,’" Bianca recalled, "and I made a statement like, ‘Yeah, because when I was born my eyes were blue and now my eyes are green.’ And then I looked at her and I said, ‘Aww, I wish you had pretty eyes.”
She claims she “didn't literally mean, she doesn’t have pretty eyes … when I said ‘pretty eyes,’ I meant the term of ‘green eyes.’”
The YouTube-famous mom then asks her husband if anyone has ever complimented his brown eyes — to which he says no — and then says her sisters (who both presumably have dark eyes) were never complimented either. But growing up, her mother says Bianca always got comments on her "pretty" green eyes, which is something she apparently wished for her daughter, too.
If you're thinking she's not exactly helping her case by saying things like that, you're not alone. Because although what she's saying may be true — it actually underscores a larger problem.
The fact is, women and girls are under enough pressure to conform to beauty standards. For women of color, the pressure is immense.
Despite the push in recent years toward body positivity and embracing their natural beauty, most women of color are up against centuries-old beauty stigmas that aren't exactly going to get shattered overnight — ones that celebrate light skin, light eyes, and fine hair. Ones that, even if unintentionally, get perpetuated with comments like Bianca's.
The bottom line is, messages we send girls about their bodies and their beauty matters. It especially matters for girls within the black community, where "light skin" and "light eyes" are often synonymous with beauty.
Comments like these aren't always so harmless — especially over time.
"There are people getting illegal surgery done on their eyes to achieve a lighter look," New Yorker Alia Cureton told BuzzFeed News. "In the black community, the hate for certain skin colors runs deep. We’re told not to stay in the sun too long because we’ll get dark."
For these reasons — and so many more — critics of the video are calling on the Prince family and others to "do better." And to remember that the way we speak about and to children about their appearance can have lasting affects for years.
