I never wanted to be a model. Growing up in Toronto, I was always asked by friends who had a T-shirt line or were having a little community runway show to model for them. I remember a friend telling me: “I can see you on the cover of Vogue.” And I looked at her like, “OK….” Not because I thought I couldn’t be a model; I just never thought about it. But then Instagram was becoming a thing and I began posting pictures of myself, and people were liking them. I thought, You know what, why not give it a shot?

That was 2013 and the beginning of the time when models who weren’t cookie-cutter-pretty were getting booked. Right now it’s so beautiful that there are so many different people and so many different sizes and all that [represented]. Growing up, I would never have imagined someone with vitiligo or freckles on the cover of a magazine. Just the fact that Adwoa [Aboah]’s gorgeous face is on the cover of British Vogue, which I’m literally looking at right now, wouldn’t have happened before.

When it comes to inclusiveness, [the modeling industry] still has a lot of work to do. For example, with hairdressers—just because you’ve worked on one black person’s hair doesn’t mean you know all black hair. If you’ve worked on Naomi Campbell, that’s not the same as working on kinky hair. There are so many people who are like, “Yeah! I’ve worked on a black girl before. I know black hair.” And then they still reach for the tongs or use too high a heat.

With makeup artists, we need to have more people who know how to work with someone with a dark skin tone and not have it turn gray or ashy. Even this past Fashion Week, I was backstage and put in front of a makeup artist and I looked at the range of tones she had—she didn’t even have colors dark enough for my skin. If you don’t even have shades dark enough for me, that’s saying a lot.

We have to keep educating people. When the Evening Standard ran a picture of me with a caption describing me as a vitiligo “sufferer,” it tore me to shreds. I said to my agent, “WTF. Again? Is this a joke?” That’s how I feel every single time I see that word placed beside my name. It’s something I see often, so I felt like I should say something. Just because you see someone with whatever it is, even a pimple, you don’t get to say that they are suffering. It’s very rude for anyone to describe me as a sufferer, and it takes away from everything else—I’m 100 percent excelling in everything I do.

Today I represent a different standard of what people traditionally consider beauty. Sometimes I say there are a million different standards of beauty; sometimes I say there are no standards of beauty. In the end, it’s the same thing: We’re all beautiful.

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