Ugly: Giving us back our beauty standards

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Bhagwandas is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and brand consultant based in London, and the beauty columnist for the Guardian's Saturday magazine. Join her for a conversation with Sali Hughes, the Guardian’s resident beauty columnist and the author of Everything is Washable. Anita’s experience in the industry both as a journalist and a brand consultant gives a very unique, detailed and practical look at how to really finesse and cut through to ensure maximum results when pitching. From the angle to the actual approach, creative AND insider anecdotal tips, this was by far the strongest refresh AND new learnings workshop I’ve attended in a very long while.Add to that specific bespoke advice from pre-submitted questions in a confidential and constructive discussion environment, and the “story” here is – SIGN UP. NOW. This discomfort followed me from my teens to university and into adult life – a constant imaginary friend always there to remind you of your lowly place in the world. It gradually evolved into a toxic obsession with thinness – and all that it promised: success, acceptance and prettiness. You're suddenly thrown from this long history – or an entire lifetime – of being told you're ugly to then all of a sudden being told you can love yourself. There's a huge chasm between those two things and it's hard to flip that switch and switch your entire idea and vision of yourself overnight. I think that's what a lot of people are expected to do and it can feel quite jarring to see people who are so comfortable with themselves and not feel like that yourself and wonder why you don't. 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.

When you put that look on women of colour, it’s saying all racial features should be corrected to look like Caucasian ones. Like shading noses until they’re razor-thin, it’s become about correction and not enhancement. Worryingly, it translates as racial features need to be corrected.” 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. 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?

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We're still told that it's good to be thin rather than bigger... even though we have body positivity," Bhagwandas shares. 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. I wish every woman of any age could read this one. It has certainly given me so much room for thought. I knew beauty standards ran deeper than we’d been told or that we’re conscious of day-to-day," explains Bhagwandas. "I think deep down we all know that the constant pressure on women in particular to be thin, young, or a certain shape comes from somewhere. But in the moment, when we feel bad about our appearance, it’s hard to remember that." Published: 30 Sep 2023 At war with my own skin: my life with eczema – and how I found the key to keeping it away

I then made a pivotal life choice. Where is the worst place you can imagine a broken human obsessed with being thin and beautiful and never quite measuring up might find themselves? You guessed it: women’s fashion magazines. Who profits? Keeping women feeling small, old, unworthy and ugly supports patriarchy and capitalism. People get rich when women buy stuff they don’t need via the creation of beauty anxiety. lululemon's Wundermost bodywear almost broke the Internet this week - what we thought as the first to try 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 buyAs 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. 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. Am I fixed? Do I walk around giving myself high fives in wing mirrors and windows? No. But I feel so much more at peace with my appearance and, instead of dwelling on the time lost feeling ugly, I feel fired up instead. So much of what I uncovered in researching my book – about the history of our beauty standards and how they’re insidiously dictated to us – fuelled a sense of injustice within me that made me want to take ownership of my appearance. UGLY reframes how we think about self-worth and appearance: 3 things author Anita Bhagwandas wants you to know Every brush stroke became a silent prayer for me to look like the girls around me who were held up as the beauty ideal. Those girls all looked largely the same: white, thin and pretty, everything I was shown I wasn’t. Think Joey Potter in Dawson’s Creek, Marissa Cooper in The OC or Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls, and their wholesome, effortless good looks. I genuinely believed that people were staring at me because I was so deeply unappealing and odd-looking.

Cosmetic surgery seems to boom during periods of female emancipation, for example during the 1980s when more women were entering male-dominated workplaces than ever before. When the contraceptive pill was introduced in the 1960’s it gave women more reproductive rights but subsequently, body standards shifted to being ultra-slim. She describes a formative experience growing up in south Wales, when she was told she was ‘too big’ to wear one of the fairy-tale dresses being handed out at her first princess party. This is when I started doing research into where our beauty trends come from and the different things that affect them, from politics to colonisation to class – it was a real turning point for me. That's why I wrote the book, to make sense of that void (or chasm) in the middle."In a society where beauty sometimes seems to be the gateway to everything we celebrate - fame, wealth, success, love - Does being ugly mean you can never achieve true happiness? 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.” 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)