Less than a month after CoverGirl recruited its first male brand ambassador, the makeup company has broken barriers again by welcoming a new Muslim beauty ambassador.
Nura Afia, 24, is the first woman to wear a hijab in CoverGirl advertising.
Afia, a beauty blogger and YouTube makeup guru, will appear alongside fellow ambassadors James Charles, Katy Perry and Sofia Vergara in a new campaign for CoverGirl's So Lashy mascara.
She told Refinery 29 she grew up being insecure about wearing a hijab.
"I never thought I'd see women like me represented in such a global brand, and so it means the world to me and for me to be that woman representing women like me," she said. "It's unimaginable. It's my dream come true."
Afia, who has more than 300,000 subscribers on Instagram, works as a makeup artist at a Denver Sephora store.
"I'm honestly an average person," she told the Today show. "I'm only five feet tall. I'm not the perfect beauty standard. I never had braces, so I have kind of crooked bottom teeth. This is unreal for me. I always thought I had to be taller and have perfect teeth to even think about being in something this big ... I've never seen a hijabi or a Muslim woman on a billboard in Times Square. That's as big as it gets."
A television commercial featuring Afia and other CoverGirl #LashEquality influencers is set to air next week.
"I hope (this campaign) will show Muslim women that brands care about us as consumers and we're important, especially hijabis," Afia said. "We can be featured on TV, can be featured on billboards in Times Square, can be represented."
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