Too ugly to have a beauty blog?

The other day, some random troll on Twitter said that beauty bloggers like Shen, Sophie, Nikki, and I shouldn't be beauty blogging because we're not pretty. I forget the exact wording since I immediately blocked the account. I'm not even irritated or anything - I just rolled my eyes. That particular Twitter account was set up solely to troll celebrities like Solen Heussaf and the Magalona sisters. 

Anyway. The comment reminded me of a conversation I had with other people over on Twitter some months back. A well-known fashion blogger commented that most beauty bloggers don't have the looks to be actually doing it. Again, I'm not offended, but the comment did hit a chord since it misunderstood the essence of what I do.

I replied to her and said that the point of beauty blogging is to demonstrate how average women can look better than they already do. It's about baring all our flaws, in detail, and then showing how they can be corrected with the right products and techniques. It's much less glamorous than what fashion, food, or even tech bloggers do - they take pictures of beautiful things and show them in their best light while we, the beauty bloggers, show our pores and pimples. 

So do we need to be conventionally beautiful to be proper beauty bloggers? No. Even internationally famous beauty bloggers are not beautiful in the normal sense of the word, and therein lies their relevance. Beauty bloggers are much more personal and in some ways more courageous than other niche blogs precisely because they dare to talk about what they don't like about themselves, and then find ways to reverse or at least be comfortable with them.

At the end of the day, my goal as a beauty blogger is to encourage other women to find solutions to their skin, hair, and body problems, however trite they may seem to other people. I don't have to look like a beauty queen to do that. :)