Ugly: Giving us back our beauty standards

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We live in a society that not only encourages us to obsess over our appearances – but where those who control the narrative of what is or isn’t 'attractive' are those who profit from our insecurities. How has it come to this? The word ‘ugly’ – and its connotations – isn’t just used blatantly and aggressively of course – it can be implied in more nuanced ways, through advertising and social media, for example. The suggestion being that if you can look a certain way, your life will be perfect. Take one of the biggest make-up trends in the past 10 years: contouring. When Kim Kardashian went viral after posting her contouring selfie in 2012, it showed how our faces could be manipulated into looking entirely different with elaborate make-up techniques. Contouring wasn’t new – Max Factor popularised it in the 20s at his Hollywood salon, and movie actors like Vivien Leigh used it in the 30s. Kim Kardashian, centre, was one of the first to make modern contouring techniques popular (Photo: Todd Williamson/E! Entertainment/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty)

That trend for highlighting the ends of our noses to create a defined tip is, again, a beauty ideal that stems from whiteness. MAC artistic director Terry Barber told me in a feature for Glamour: “Everyone is trying to look the same to fit into a social media and reality TV look. The danger is this is a Caucasian beauty ideal for all women. This new beauty ideal is also based on the idea of surgical correction – the highly sexualised kind you see on Love Island and The Kardashians. Diving into the origins of the constantly changing beauty standards and how they correlate with women winning more rights, my jaw dropped quite a few times.

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I’m also beauty columnist for The Guardian Saturday magazine, freelance Beauty Director at Condé Nast Traveller, and contribute to several international publications. I’d feel its piercing criticism when I swiped on layers of concealer to cover my dark circles or when I blotted furiously at my oil-drenched skin with too-pale powder. Every brush stroke became a silent prayer, a plea for me to look like the girls around me held up as the beauty ideal. I can’t help but grieve and be furious that these beauty archetypes made me feel so ugly at such a young age. But at the same time, taking a more critical and challenging perspective on the limited and limiting beauty standards we’ve been force-fed has helped me close that loop of self loathing. You know, the one that tells you you’re not thin/pretty/straight-haired/light-skinned enough to be valuable.

There are so many things we unintentionally carry without knowing why or how they became ours to shoulder. From perpetuated beauty standards to ideal ways of being and emotional burdens, understanding how to recognise and question these beliefs could be the key to higher levels of self-acceptance and self-worth. I wish every woman of any age could read this one. It has certainly given me so much room for thought. As an adult, I’ve tried diligently to “fix” my “ugly” problem. As the saying goes, God loves a trier, and I tried hard – so I’m definitely going to heaven. I’ve embarked on multiple extreme diets, cleanses and detox retreats; I’ve taken appetite suppressants and spent endless hours researching various weight-loss surgeries. I have obsessed over beauty products, techniques and treatments. Either way, the message is the same – you are not enough. By belittling your self-esteem and sense of worth, ‘ugliness’ is presented as a problem that needs to be ‘fixed’, says Anita, and typically the solutions involve spending money.

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UGLY reframes how we think about self-worth and appearance: 3 things author Anita Bhagwandas wants you to know Once you know that there are mechanisms like that... and that there are elements actively still defining what we see as beautiful now, it's really powerful. Then, you're able to make the choice as to whether you agree with it or not." This was not new information to me; I’d always felt resoundingly unattractive when it came to my appearance. And now, here was the proof for everyone to see. Had the troll criticised my writing, called me “weird-looking”, even the customary “fat bitch” or one of the similar insults I’d received before, perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite so rattled, but here was an online confirmation from a stranger of how I really felt about myself. This was indisputable truth: I was ugly. I try to police negative self-talk by catching myself when I feel I look “tired” – a codeword for old – and questioning what exact trigger made me feel this way – whether it was somebody I compared myself with on TV, or something somebody said about my appearance. Once I’ve figured it out, I write down why it made me feel so bad: ageing is a natural process after all. In this case it’s the way women over 40 are so seldom celebrated as desirable. Then I try to create an action around it: by filling my social media feed with women who live life unrestricted by arbitrary definitions of age for inspiration. I now focus on using makeup for self-expression, rather than obsessing about trying to ‘conceal flaws’ or look younger Working on the inside of the beauty industry, I started to notice some changes. Around 2010, social media gave people a voice and more control over what magazines and brands were creating for them, eroding the carefully crafted elitism and exclusion that I’d been chipping away at from the inside. Campaigns started to become more inclusive on a surface level (though they still rarely featured anyone genuinely plus size, with disabilities or dark skin) and the beauty product launches I attended finally offered shades of foundation in my skin tone and informed me that instead of trying to fit in, I should feel “empowered”. I didn’t. Anita Bhagwandas: ‘When I started to read about beauty standards, who created them and held the strings, things started to shift.’ Photograph: Kellie French/The Guardian

These days, before buying anything, I ask myself a series of questions to combat marketing and societal pressure. Let’s take a face-massaging device … The ‘jar of hope’ is hard to resist, but we can and should. Photograph: Getty Images To say that navigating “ugly” shaped my life is an understatement. It affected everything, including my career trajectory, which eventually led to me becoming a beauty editor. I had put myself into the very world that I had felt so alienated from. Why? I hoped that being around so much of it would finally rub off on me. Instead, I felt uglier than ever. The whole point of me including historical research was to show this is happening again and again. Until we know where that comes from and why that happens, it’s really hard to distance and protect yourself from it.” Who isn’t feeling like this? Men – largely speaking. They don’t have the pressure to look under 30 all their lives. Often they’re told they look better with age.

Take cosmetic ‘tweakments’. In Ugly, Anita highlights that ‘the UK is the fastest growing market for facial filler and British plastic surgeons reported a 70 per cent rise in requests for consultations in 2020 – and yet our levels of body confidence are decreasing’. Perhaps the biggest shift was learning why I’d reduced my self-worth to being entirely defined by how I look, and that made me realise how imperative it was to root my self-esteem elsewhere, in the qualities that really define me – my character and positive traits. Because ugly is an ever-changing, politically charged construct – and the biggest lesson I’ve learned is never to trust those binary categories, “pretty” and “ugly”, don’t actually exist. * * * How to resist the ‘jar of hope’ impulse buy