From Miss World to Parliament: Beauty, Power, and Reinvention with Lisa Hanna

Skin Anarchy

Lisa Hanna, former Miss World and Jamaican parliamentarian, shares her journey from beauty pageant to political leadership and now entrepren

Key takeaways

• Beauty standards often marginalize authentic identity, especially for women in leadership roles.
• Aging should not be seen as something to reverse but as an accumulation of wisdom and experience.

Main topics

• Beauty and power dynamics for women
• Aging and self-acceptance in skincare

Notable quotes

We accumulate with age. You sit down and you want to speak to wise people.

Conclusion

Lisa Hanna's journey underscores a powerful message: true beauty lies in self-awareness, authenticity, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome back to Skin Anarchy. I'm so excited about our episode today because we are going to be really diving into the world of beauty from, I think, a very unique angle. Our guest today has so much amazing experience in her career from so many different avenues when it comes to looking at what women go through, when it comes to understanding how we perceive ourselves, what we go through day to day in our careers, and now creating her own line and coming into the beauty space as an entrepreneur. So I'm so excited. Please welcome Lisa Hanna. Welcome, Lisa. I'm so excited. Speaker 2 (0:28) Hi. Thanks. Thanks, Ed. It's good to be here and good to communicate with you. I've listened to your podcast for a long time and I like it because not only is it deep and profound, but you definitely delve into the more substantive issues that sometimes are not the superficial ones that people want to hear. So I'm always for listening to what you have to say. Speaker 1 (0:53) Thank you so much. That means a lot coming from you. And I'm hoping we can we can deem some things because your career is truly, truly profound. It's so amazing what you've already accomplished and seen, you know, all the different angles. And I really actually want to start there, Lisa, if you don't mind kind of walking us down memory lane. You started in the beauty world, you know, with Miss World in 1993. And then you moved into politics. I mean, that's that's very, you know, interesting. Walk us down that lane. Speaker 2 (1:21) Well, I was an accidental beauty queen. So I left high school and then my mother, who used to make all my clothes, I think it was more of a dream of hers for me to enter Miss Jamaica. So I was more of a freedom fighter, school leader, community activist. But I used to model her clothes when she made them. So I think she thought that it would have been okay. And I was also a black belt instructor. So I was a tomboy. So I entered Miss Jamaica when I was 17, just leaving high school, I think more as a... to satisfy her. And I won. And I won big. At the time, I was a host of a national television program. So the country had already known who I was, but I certainly didn't know how to tweeze my eyebrows. And I had very big hair. I was just not that girl that dreamed of being a beauty queen. So won that in September. Then I went to Miss World in South Africa and won. And at the time, South Africa was going through its democratization. So apartheid had just ended. Mandela had come to Jamaica. And I was so inspired by this man all my life. And so I was more interested in what was happening in South Africa. So I would sneak out of my hotel room. I think what happened for me truly is I didn't typify the aesthetic of what... standards of beauty were to be like because I was more organic. I was more of a people person. I would sneak out of my room to talk to the guards and the janitors and the housekeepers to just get a sense of what was happening in some cities of Africa because it was such a symbol of Speaker 2 (3:10) of in the world where Sun City was and what was happening in South Africa. And I found myself in this place that I had heard so much about and I wanted to get a sense of how they felt about it. So I think what happened for me is there was this big groundswell among the masses of the people in South Africa and the working class about Miss Jamaica. And Jamaica had played such a formidable role in the... fight of apartheid as a country who didn't in the 1950s have its own independence from Britain. So fast forward, I won Miss World. It was at 18 and I was thrust into a world that was very different. I felt as if... I was an other. In other words, I wasn't the person who was a superficial person, not saying that beauty was superficial, but it was not something that I was accustomed to. The makeup artists, the hair, the modeling, how to project in that way. I was much more of an introvert in a certain respect. I mean, if you see me on stage, you'll be like, no, she's not. So I decided at the end of that, and before I even won Miss World, I was a UNDP Goodwill Ambassador, which was the direction I was heading into. So I did two degrees, Optimist World, worked around the world in project management. In my early 30s, I was the youngest member of parliament, a female member of parliament in Jamaica, became a minister of government very early, a cabinet minister, spent 20 years basically in politics. I retired last year. I'm a kick-ass. Speaker 2 (4:53) political strategist, and I was good at it. And I said, you know, well, at 50, this is, I think it's time to give other people, I think leadership has an obligation to give other people an opportunity to present their ideas. And I think as leaders, especially in national policy, there comes a point where you need to give the generation coming forward the ability to express themselves about what their generation needs. And I had always believed that. And I thought, well, if this is your belief system, you need to step. And so in stepping, I knew that I also still had to fund a lot of the activist things that I was still doing. And I found that there was this very big idea, because as I got older, the concept of becoming more. was something that I believed. We accumulate with age. You sit down and you want to speak to wise people. When we go to a surgeon, we want somebody with experience. You typically want to get advice from your parents or your grandparents. But for some reason, the language that we were taught in the beauty industry has been built around correction and reversing. And language is never neutral. You know, if we're constantly told that the evidence of time is something to correct, eventually we see ourselves and believe that time has diminished us. And I rejected that. So there was the narrative of beauty that I was rejecting because I was seeing so many young women insecure and so many of my colleagues insecure about getting older. You know, what am I going to do? And then there was the other thing where, because I was, working in fields and farms and I had the largest constituency in Jamaica geographically. The temperature has fixed in roads and you're in gullies and as an MP you had to press flesh. If you don't, if you're not with the people day in day out apart from parliament and in the ministry you're not going to win your seat again and so an election was every five years. So my skin as it aged I felt the difference. So I couldn't do retinol. I couldn't do alpha hydroxy. I couldn't do vitamin C. And what I was finding is that as trends developed, the industry would pump copious amounts of actives into products that wouldn't match skin. And so I felt the industry was more homogenous and it was aggressive in this fight to reverse correct. And I felt there wasn't anything out there. And I tried everything. So from I was a teenager, I knew about beauty. I knew about the beauty lines. I was a person with Estee Lauder when the yellow moisturizer came out. And then it was Lancome. And then it was La Mer. And then it was Guerlain. Then it was Chanel. And so many different things. And then there was this real explosion of other brands, which I also tried. But I would have to shop across brands and I said, you know what? This is not helping me because as a woman that needs 30 hours in a 24-hour day, I don't have the time to do this. And nothing is existing to give my skin what it really needs at this point. So that's it in a nutshell, basically. Yeah. Speaker 1 (8:33) No, I mean, I have so many questions, honestly, because you've touched on so many topics that I, you know, first of all, I mean, I'm just, I'm blown away with all of the things that you've... you know, you've done and you've seen and you've accomplished. And I really want to actually ask you this because I feel like a lot of times women in power, the way that we perceive them is even more, like we scrutinize them even more than we already scrutinize women, you know, with beauty. Speaker 2 (8:55) Before we open our mouth. Speaker 1 (8:56) Yeah. And it's like, you know, I see, I mean, I think all of us have seen headlines where, you know, someone who, a woman who is in politics, you hear about the dress she's wearing or the way her hair is before you hear about her work or her advocacy or her passion. And I would love for you to touch on this and talk about how was that, you know, tiptoeing around all of that and, you know, still maintaining who you are from that stance of like beauty and those things. Speaker 2 (9:25) To answer it, I would have to tell you that in the beginning, I was a novelty. So when I went into parliament, it was, where's this beauty queen going? She cannot have any sense. And why is she coming here? And maybe for the first couple of months, you got heckled. I got heckled. And that was very clear. But I think very quickly, they realized that there was such a deep... intellectualism to who I was. Speaker 1 (9:57) And Speaker 2 (9:57) that was the first thing. The second thing is I was not a pushover. I was a blood sporter. And so my ability on the X and Y axis to not only be intellectual, but to kick your ass in the field and to stand up to you. So I'm fearless. And they've learned, the men in the parliament learned very, very quickly, just not to. Speaker 2 (10:23) not to judge me that way. And then over the course of my nearly 20 years in politics, there was always a fight. And you learned, or certainly I was good at it. So I knew that in any political war, somebody would have to die on the political battlefield, but it Speaker 1 (10:39) wasn't going to be me. Speaker 2 (10:40) So a Speaker 1 (10:41) lot of Speaker 2 (10:41) my political career, both as minister, as MP, as regional chairman, as treasurer of the party, as... as somebody who was always in the top three in the polls of the country as a representative, yes, I was a target. The second thing that would happen, though, is I'm somebody that has always lifted weights and was very much into exercise. Speaker 2 (11:11) What I would wear, and it wasn't that I was not elegant or graceful, but I would always be picked on. So there were two motions, for example, in parliament about how women should dress because one day I wore something sleeveless. Or I remember the speaker called me once to say, you know, Lisa, the men are having problems because they said your pants are too tight. When nothing like that. But, you know, the funny thing is I've never dwelled on those things. Because I have always been an iron fist in a silk glove. So I've never focused on that. And I think they knew that those things never bothered me. And even when some of the harshest political critics, I just kept going. And so to know, there was a real sadness on the part of the country when I decided to retire. Because there was, this is a... woman who has grown up in front of the country. We've seen her since she was 14. We saw her win Miss World. We've seen her do this. We were hoping she would be our prime minister. And so there is still this longing. But you get that. And way before you open your mouth, there is this judgment. So even, I remember once I wore a swimsuit and posted it Speaker 1 (12:32) in Speaker 2 (12:33) 2013. And that created a national debate. The newspapers wrote articles about it. The Catholic Church came out about it. You know, she, how can our minister of government be in a swimsuit, in a bikini? Speaker 1 (12:46) And I had a t-shirt on. Speaker 2 (12:48) So Speaker 1 (12:48) there was always, I think there was, there Speaker 2 (12:49) was always something that they, somebody would have to say, no, it's, it's very interesting because there's an ageist. component to the beauty so no because I put on a swimsuit and it's like well why is she in 50 51 in a swimsuit she should be covering up so I think in all the parts of my life there's always been something that I have had to surmount or to hurdle so now I'm getting that other part and people are saying what you know she's she's showing her products work and it's true Speaker 1 (13:31) Yeah. I mean, that's such a very, very strong statement, what you said, the ageist component in beauty. I think now more than ever, we're starting to see it resurface and now it's getting rebranded. And it kind of