Count Us In

Three women from different walks of life aim to build a kinder, safer and inclusive future for all

- Koyyi Chin

Before we begin, this isn’t a story where we throw around the classics like ‘beauty is skin-deep’ or ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We aren’t so much as ‘rewriting’ the narrative of conventional beauty as we are taking it apart entirely and steering it in an entirely different direction. We are going to talk about the narrative of inclusion (or its lack of ) with three women who have been through varying degrees of societal rejection just because of surface-level differences and have come out stronger for it. This is a story about the ripple of change, no matter how small, for the waves it will make in the future.

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For Rocyie Wong, who is a known psoriasis advocate that has lived with this chronic skin condition ever since she was 14, rejection was a familiar, if unwelcome, friend. “Most people don’t know how painful psoriasis is,” she says. “So it never crosses their mind at how physically challenging it is to have skin that flakes and itches all the time. I actually had to stop going to school at certain points to just recover, so while others took three years to complete their courses, I took four. I was 20 at the time.”