To Care or Not to Care...About Being Beautiful

I grew up actively not caring about Beauty because I didn’t think I was beautiful. I wanted to be beautiful but when I compared myself to my sisters and friends that I & others believed to be beautiful, I fell short in my eyes. My skin color was too dark, my cheeks had a smattering of freckles, I had an overbite, my nose was too wide…the list went on for far too long when I look back now. I truly believed that I possessed features that others didn’t find to be beautiful.

To protect myself from being rejected based on my looks, I decided to proactively NOT care about beauty or being beautiful. I chose to look down upon the pursuit of beauty and anyone who gave importance to it. I found it easier to focus on my personality rather than striving for quick fixes in makeup and other beauty tools to make up for the deficits I saw on my face. Now to be clear, I wasn’t particularly book smart or maybe I was but thanks to my nasty habit of comparing myself to others, I didn’t think I was that smart. But I was funny. I had a knack for making people laugh rather effortlessly so I decided to double down on that.

Back to beauty…I didn’t know how to deal with this internal struggle of wanting to be beautiful, do things to be beautiful, and resigning to the perception that I’m not beautiful. Of course in my younger days I didn’t see this as a struggle - I’ve always been great at deluding myself into believing that I was some kind of hero for making an unpopular choice, and I would wear it like a badge of honor. So I went about my life proudly being a contrarian.

When I did “succumb” to the tropes of traditional beauty standards, either because of pressure from friends and/or family, I did so begrudgingly.

1. Wearing makeup - I believed that only ugly or insecure women loved wearing makeup and I didn’t want to be classified as either. So during my college years when my friends were keeping up with all the latest makeup trends like pastel frosted eyeshadows and ultra-lined lips (gotta love the 90s!), I tiptoed in with makeup “adjacent” products like Vicco face cream (IYKYK) instead of foundation and MAYBE some eyeshadow every now and then

2. Eyebrow hygiene - also during this time came the rise of eyebrow threading to meet the demands of the skinny brow trend all the celebrities and models were feeding into. My South Asian friends were going in droves to the beauty salons to slim down their naturally thick and “unruly” eyebrows. I didn’t think my eyebrows were all that thick but a childhood scar misshaped my right eyebrow, so I decided (begrudgingly) to start the bi-weekly visits to the beauty salon to clean up and maintain my lightly shaped eyebrows.

3. Coloring white hairs - getting golden or light brown highlights in their dark trusses was also a popular trend amongst the South Asian women around me at that time, but I never colored my hair because I told myself that I didn’t want to mess with the naturally fine texture of my hair. So even when I started to prematurely gray, I didn’t bother covering them up because I was frankly too lazy. But this changed in my later years…this is a whole other newsletter topic so let’s put a pin it in for now

When I look back at those times now at the age of 45, I wonder what my life would have been like if I had allowed myself to care about being Beautiful. Allowed myself to love or at least appreciate my feminine desires to adorn and beautify myself to be pleasing to the male gaze, rather than seeing it as a weakness in my character. Yes, I used to adamantly believe that being a “girly girl” was a failure of character because it meant giving things like clothes, makeup & jewelry more importance than the truly more important things in life education, experiences, & relationships. All because I didn’t believe I was beautiful.

But what if I had believed?

I can’t change the past but I want to evolve my present for a healthier future, which means tackling the question of whether I should or shouldn’t care about being Beautiful.

So to that end, I’m finally recognizing my beauty and I’m allowing myself to believe I am Beautiful. Now I’m wondering how I want to approach “Beauty” as I age since I’m literally becoming less beautiful by society’s standards.

I don’t have that figured out just yet, but that’s partly why I’ve started this newsletter 😃