Nigella Lawson is speaking out. The celebrity chef took to Twitter on Saturday, December 15, to give a piece of her mind to American television stations, which she claims have edited, or tried to edit, her body.
“I’ve had to tell American tv stations not to airbrush my sticking out stomach,” the TV personality, 58, shared. “The hatred of fat, and assumption that we’d all be grateful to be airbrushed thinner is pernicious.”
Lawson’s tweet, which has been liked more than 1,700 times, came in response to The Good Place star Jameela Jamil’s rebuke of an article mentioning her that appeared in Ireland’s Sunday Business Post. The piece called Jamil’s acceptance crusade and anti-Photoshop feelings – she has previously appealed to celebs such as Cardi B and Khloé Kardashian to stop promoting detox teas – an attempt to beseech others “to look uglier.”
“She thinks you’re ‘UGLY’ just as you are,” Jamil tweeted of the article’s author, Nadine O’Regan. “She also doesn’t understand that a huge part of why I hate photoshop is how it’s used as a tool of erasure of ethnicities, our skin color, our features. This is embarrassing white privilege and deep misogyny.”
Not surprisingly, Lawson’s initial tweet was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback. “All the power to you #MsLawson You are the real deal,” one Twitter user wrote. Added another: “I think I may have just fallen in love with you even more!”
Throughout her career, the cookbook author has frequently spoken up about maintaining a positive body image. “One is expected to be a certain shape and it’s not a shape that many women are naturally. I think that is difficult. There isn’t just one way to be,” she told The Australian Women’s Weekly in June. “I don’t prize extreme thinness. I don’t equate thinness with health. So many people want to be unnaturally thin, which means they are going to have a struggle every day for the rest of their lives.”
