Barbie Ferreira says goodbye to Euphoria

The balances of Euphoria's third season have already blown before the release: Kat Hernandez, a character who brings crucial themes to the screen for the cultural facet of the storyline, will not return to the scenes. It was Barbie Ferreira herself who announced this in a simple, heartfelt IG story: 

"After four years of being able to embody Kat's most special and enigmatic character, I must say goodbye with tears in my eyes," reads Barbie's Instagram stories. "I hope that many of you empathized with her, as I did, and that it brought you joy to see her journey to the character she is today. I put all my care and love into her and I hope you can feel that. I love you Katherine Hernandez."

With Barbie's farewell, the TV series loses a character who served to develop themes such as online sex work, dominant femininity arising from teenage trauma, and body acceptance, which are definitely current and relevant to the series' target audience of Gen-Zers and millennials raised on the Internet. As a curvy girl with a distinct consciousness of her femininity, built on trauma that forced her to come to terms with her feelings, Kat's character has been an example, an inspiration and a role model for thousands of girls in her same situation, and becoming an idol of body positivity. Make-up in the series is a form of character storytelling with a social role, and her looks represented the emotional seesaw she experienced on a daily basis, between the desire to feel and the lack of self-esteem that became concrete with the use of graphic lines and acid and complex colors, with references somewhere between the femininity of Poison Ivy and Welma from Scooby Doo. 

Blowing up the agreements that tied Barbie Ferreira to Euphoria would be a quarrel with director Sam Levinson, who kept asserting his desire to use Kat as a character representing a segment of the audience sensitive to body positivity, in an almost instrumental way of Barbie's popularity to continue to deal with sensitive topics such as mental health or the relationship with the body, or as it is misleadingly and hyper-synthetically said on the Internet, of self-love. Impossible to forget the scene in the second episode of the second season, in which in a black moment Kat has a fictitious conversation in her room with fitness models, a feminist, and curvy girls who incite her not to hate herself and to do something, get out of bed and stop feeling sorry for herself because she does not meet the beauty standards that patriarchal society imposes, and practice some self-love. Exposed in this staging is the toxic rhetoric of well-being and self-love that obsessively affects young girls, in which one's own pain is devalued in favor of an immediate reaction, a simple solution to a complex problem, without going through actual processing of the malaise as any mental health specialist would advise.

The actress would have felt too framed in the role of self-love and female empowerment representative, and convinced that the character deserved the same development as others toward new horizons like those of Maddy or Cassie would have left the role to devote herself to her modeling and acting career, despite the kind words shared on Instagram.