It's okay to be ugly. What's not okay is to give up on yourself.
I suppose it is radical that this should come from a beauty blogger, but in the eleven years that I’ve worked in this industry, I’ve come to realize that it’s completely okay to be ugly. Yes, you heard it. It’s okay to be ugly. It’s absolutely fine that you don’t fit in the mold of what everyone else thinks is beautiful - it’s fine that your skin is a mess, your hair is falling out, you’re fat, or that you’re too dark. So many women who are not considered conventionally beautiful blaze their own trails and find their own way. I mean, you need only look at the amazing achievements of Samin Nostrat, Mindy Kaling, or Naomi Watabe! You can do that too, and you don’t need the permission of being beautiful to get started.
That being said I still believe that aiming (even just loosely) for conventional beauty grants one some advantage in their pursuit of love, success, and ultimately happiness. I would even argue that it’s one of the easiest ways to improve self-confidence or even just develop a positive outlook in life! I mean, not everybody believes that crystals or witchcraft are actually magic, but telling one’s self that quartz will improve good luck and fortune or that saging will clear out negative energy from one’s home goes a long way to at least hope that it might work. The intentionality of the act matters the most. Wearing red lipstick to battle a difficult day is simply a visual reminder that one intends to win.
The real challenge, however, is improving the rest of yourself. This involves unraveling years of trauma, self-flagellation, and failure by looking at - and I mean truly looking at - the monuments to pain that you’ve built into the blueprint of who you are. From there you can work towards forgiving yourself for the things you are not and the life you don’t have. You can draft a new plan and build again. You can upgrade yourself by becoming smarter, more skilled, surrounding yourself with a community, owning a purpose, experiencing new things, and taking care of your health. This is the work that will improve your life, but it’s not instant or easy.
It might sound like such an impossible distance from where you are, I know, so you better start walking.
