Instagram Sensation ‘Kinky Sweat’ Mixes Feats of Beauty and Strength

Meet Alicia Archer. She’s a dancer, a fitness instructor, and a makeup aficionado — known by her 25,000 Instagram followers for her “Kinky Sweat” posts, which combine glittery hair and makeup looks with videos that showcase her eye-popping physical strength, flexibility, and balance skills.

“Learning flexibility as an adult, I think, intrigues a lot of people,” Archer, 32, tells Yahoo Beauty of her growing legion of followers.

A New York City native, Archer says she fell in love with makeup as a teen and while attending college — learning performance in a program that combines it with academics at the Alvin Ailey School of Dance — which deepened her exploration of cosmetics through stage makeup for performances.

After starting a front-desk gig at an Equinox health club — where Archer now teaches about a dozen classes a week in barre and a dynamic, barefoot cardio class based on a technique called BodyArt (quickly growing in popularity) — the dance major became even more tuned in to her appearance.

“I was always a skincare buff, but eventually I started watching YouTube, and that in combination with attending castings and getting aerial gigs — performing on the cube or lyra (hoop) for special events at club parties where you’re required to wear very elaborate costumes with neon and studs — your makeup … you pretty much have to power up with that,” Archer tells Yahoo Beauty. (She now has more than 11,800 subscribers to her own YouTube channel.)

Regarding makeup, she says, “I know it’s stigmatized, taking pride in how you look, but I think it gets misunderstood, because there’s definitely a difference between relying on makeup for confidence and knowing that you’re still beautiful without it. I definitely love makeup as an art.”

And it’s an art Archer doesn’t skip before hitting the gym for hardcore classes — even before the ones she teaches at the crack of dawn. “It adds like half an hour, and I know it’s so stupid because it’s so early in the morning, but it’s like my meditation,” she says about doing a full-on primp at sunrise. “I look forward to getting up and creating a new face.”

Archer has plenty of sweat-proof products to recommend for anyone who wants a full face during an intense workout session.

“I really love the Hourglass Vanish Seamless Foundation Stick, which came out last year,” she says, because it’s waterproof, super-pigmented, and long-lasting. “That stuff’s bulletproof, but still looks like skin.” (For a more affordable option, Archer recommends Maybelline Fit Me.) She starts with Hourglass Veil Mineral Primer to combat oiliness, but also loves Shine Killer from NYX.

Also high on Archer’s list: the entire new, sweat-proof athleisure line from Tarte, including the Lifted mascara, which is “black-brown, really natural-looking, but provides curl and length and nice hold” (with Better Than Sex Too Faced as a nice alternative) — and the tinted moisturizer with SPF 30.

As for hair products, Archer has recently begun collaborating with an all-natural brand she loves — Uncle Funky’s Daughter — through her YouTube videos. “One of their slogans is ‘keep the junk in the trunk,’ and it’s free of sulfates, parabens, mineral oils — anything cheap to act as fillers. Instead, they try to formulate with macadamia oil, coconut oil — real stuff that works,” says Archer, who is of Puerto Rican descent and whose personal journey from chemically treated hair to all-natural curls is a frequent topic on her Instagram.

“Every salon my mom brought me to just wanted to straighten it. There was no salon that embraced natural hair. It was considered bad hair, and the only way to deal with it was to chemically alter it. She finally gave in,” Archer says, adding that it wasn’t until she got older that she even realized that her hair wasn’t naturally straight, which is why she had to get it treated every couple of weeks.

“When you do that, your hair is dead hair, and it’s really hard to manage unless someone did it for you. So I had to go to the Dominicans and have it done so it didn’t look like a hot mess,” she says.

Years later, before starting college, Archer came across a story about a woman who was embracing her natural hair texture. “I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to have time to go to the beauty parlor every Sunday,’” she says, “and budgetwise, I was thinking about food and not my hair.” So she followed the lead of the woman in the article and chopped all her hair off — down to a half-inch of coiled curls — and then let it grow back naturally.

“It was scary, but also liberating,” she says. “I was free of caring what my hair looked like, and I was excited to start anew with the texture that I’d always had, and to learn how to style it.”

Related: 22-Year-Old With Cancer Slays Hospital Stays Through the Power of Makeup

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