The rise in women’s participation in Carnival in the Caribbean and abroad over the last four decades has significantly transformed and challenged traditional costuming practices that enacted narratives and characters largely designed, and performed, by men, in response to their experience of colonial oppression and post-emancipation freedom. This chapter explores the contested and complicated politics of pretty mas as a costume practice that has proliferated wherever Carnival is performed in the Atlantic world. Using the theoretical framework of Audre Lorde and adrienne maree brown, I will open a critical feminist analysis on the ways ‘Pretty mas’ can operate as an affective scenographic strategy of Black (and Brown) Joy for women of Caribbean descent. In doing so, I seek to establish a more nuanced understanding of women’s agency in Carnival that opens a new direction to consider how pretty-mas can become a location of critical black feminist praxis.