Random Tips and Quotes from A Black Girl to A Black Girl.

1. Shea butter will have your skin glistening in the summer time, but you'll also mess around and be outside cooking like a fried egg.

2.There is more than ONE WAY TO BE BEAUTIFUL.

3. Always wash your makeup off before bed.

4. Eat the cake, or pizza. Drink the soda, and wine, and the shot if you need to.

5. "Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise."

6. You don't NEED a man, you WANT a man. Learn the difference.

7. Love yourself first.

8. Write poems. Dance stories. Become music. Decorate this world with your art.

9. Cry yourself to sleep. If you wake up and the pain hasn't left, walk into your kitchen and grab a bowl of ice cream. Emotions demand to be felt. Junk food just makes it a little easier to swallow.

10. Coconut Oil.

11.When the world tries to label you, shout back that the only label you'll accept is, "MAGIC."

12. Pray for sisterhood. It is a disappearing phenomenon. Bring it back.

13. Ehh. Bras are kinda played out. If they're meant to fall, they will fall either way.

14. African Black Soap.

15. There are black proverbs that you just have to get used to. Your family will call your mate your "little friend" until you're married. You will be told you "smell like outside," even if you were only out for one minute. And she really did bring you into this world. I'm quite positive she can take you out. Don't test it.

16. Learn how to cook. Not for some little boy. But because there is power in knowing how to take care of yourself.

17. Exfoliating your skin is not optional.

18. Gender roles need to be destroyed.

19. "Boys Will Be Boys" is unacceptable.

20. Love your blackness. Your skin, your melanin. Everything they mock and then try to artificially become. Love your hips, and kinky hair, and big nose, and the extra meat on your bones, and the way your family can turn a Sunday dinner into a reunion, the way living rooms become a sanctuary of trust, and how easily music moves through your body and into your soul, your crazy uncles, and crazier cousins. Love how women you barely know become aunts and godmothers in a heart beat, how "tender-headedness" is a real term, how you are frequently imitated but never correctly. Love the black person street acknowledgement, the all day beauty salon visits, and the gossip that brings us all a little closer together. Love your community. Love your family. Love yourself. You are MAGIC.