Well hello again! Welcome to another instalment in the body positivity week. Today I wanted to address a few issues concerning the Beauty Industry, including the influence it has on us, the expectations it creates, but also the liberation of allowing us to create. This topic is a little ambiguous for me. On the one hand, my initial relationship with cosmetics was pretty toxic. From a young age, we're programmed to believe that we must look a certain way in order to be beautiful. Flawless skin. Zero pores. Bright eyes. Plump lips. Makeup and beauty trends obviously change over the years, but the message is loud and clear: you need cosmetic products to be beautiful. Which is obviously a load of bollocks. Growing up, I was suffocatingly insecure, as a lot of kids are, about my features. The pressure to look a certain way is overwhelming. And so I turned to fashion magazines and the internet for help. I discovered eyeliner and would rim my eyes inches thick with black kohl in the hope of making my eyes appear wider. Over the years, makeup became a mask to me, a way to hide my insecurities. Eventually, it got to the point that I wouldn't leave the house without it. Even on a summer holiday, I would sweat underneath a thick layer of makeup for the sake of preserving my insecurities. I hated my freckles, and would spend hours layering foundation and concealor on my skin to hide them. When puberty hit, I used makeup to to try to hide my breakouts, which in most cases only made them worse. I used makeup for all the wrong reasons, to try to turn myself into someone I wasn't and I was ashamed to be seen as anything other than this mask. Brands sell you the dream. Buy this and you'll look like them. Use this and change your face. 24 hour wear (even though wearing makeup for such a long time is SO bad for your skin). The reality is that mentality is incredibly unhealthy, and so I decided to try to change my perspective on cosmetics. I've always loved cosmetics, the pretty colours, the shimmering effects and the beautiful packaging, and I knew that giving up makeup altogether would just make me miserable, so I had to change the way I looked at it. Instead of using products to cover and disguise, I used them to highlight my features or to create a work of art. Through this, I discovered that beauty products are innovative. If used for the right reasons, you can create masterpieces, express yourself with colour, or a lack of. Paint pictures, add sparkle, or don't. Who cares! The point is that at the end of the day, the picture you've created all comes off. The fact is that you don't need it to be beautiful, but you can use it to create if you don't take it too seriously. The damaging thing about the beauty industry is that young women especially are targeted by brands to boost sales, but it's at the expense of their self confidence. If products were marketed in a different way, in a way that shows people that makeup is temporary, that we should also be embracing our natural skin, then perhaps there would be less insecurity going around. Interestingly enough, society seems to have the opposite perspective about men in makeup, which is absolutely ridiculous. A girl wearing a colourful smokey eye is attractive, but a boy wearing eyeliner and a colourful lip isn't? I think it's a load of crap. Cosmetics isn't just limited to one gender or one sexuality. We should be more accepting and appreciative of how people decide to portray themselves, regardless of who they are. The beauty industry is still something I struggle with to this day. For me, my bare face is the hardest thing to embrace as it's what people see the most, what people notice the most, and in the back of my mind, I still have these voices telling me that I look better with makeup, which isn't the case. I gradually started to use less and less makeup until eventually I was comfortable enough to brave the bare face. It's only been a recent revelation for me to actually leave the house without a stitch of makeup on, and you know what I found? No one treated me any differently. No one asked if I was tired or under the weather. No one looked at me like I was an alien, which was how I was made to feel without makeup. The fact is my day went by exactly as it would have if I'd have been wearing an entire face of my most perfectly crafted makeup. Shock horror. I think the important thing about cosmetics is to enjoy them and enjoy the time you spend applying them and creating. If you find yourself thinking 'I can't be arsed putting makeup on today, but I feel ugly without it' then you know you're using it for the wrong reasons. What helped me the most was to spend a day without makeup, even if it was somewhere I wasn't likely to see people I knew, and I found that no one recoiled in horror at my face. I also found that treating my skin better boosted my face positivity. Drinking water, actually removing my makeup properly at the end of the day and trying to limit the hours spent wearing a full face gave me the confidence to go bare faced. I took selfies without makeup on and eventually, got myself used to the image of my naked face. I'd almost become so accustomed to my face covered in makeup that I didn't recognise myself without it, so familiarising yourself with your features and learning to love them with and without makeup has improved my relationship with cosmetics as well as my own self confidence. I've touched a little bit today on male body confidence and the expectations bestowed on them by society, and so my next post will be dedicated to discussing male stereotypes. The media portrays this image of how an attractive man should look, when in fact, an attractive person comes in all shapes, sizes, colours, lengths and so on. Until next time beauties!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
December 2022
Categories
All
Author
Part-time student/bar-associate |