Create your own concept of beauty

You may be surprised to find out that I have struggled to acknowledge my kind of beauty from childhood and for most of my adulthood. I did not believe I am beautiful in any way but rather a person with common, boring face features. Never thought about me as being ugly, didn’t experience that extreme but if I would be, to sum up, my past perception about how beautiful I thought I was in one word would be plain.

After reading this, you are probably wondering what the fuck I am talking about!

What do you mean you thought about yourself as being plain and lacking beauty?

It took a little bit of work to uncover how and when I have formed these beliefs and to change the narrative stories attached to the word beauty.

Through a thorough exploration, I realised that were two aspects who contributed to forming these distorted beliefs.

First one was the comparison made by others, between myself and my cousin during the childhood period.  We were very close, up to the age of 12, when my parents divorced, and I had to move town together with my mom and brother. I remember spending most evenings playing together, after school or on weekends. We were of course very different features wise like every person is, at least you have a twin brother or sister.

I remember a multitude of occasions when an adult would complement my cousin for her soft light brown hair, green eyes or expressing how beautiful she was overall. In these moments I was just next to her, often noticing how someone would eventually turn their head to me, pausing for a few seconds then start comparing our eyes colour emphasising that green eyes are more beautiful than black. The most difficult moments were perhaps when some of our family members were making comments about my nose being too thin or sharp or comments about me being too skinny.

I couldn’t understand at that time how can adults make so many silly comments, but I do now. I chose, however, to move on and not comment on this as I believe is a waste of my time.

The second aspect who contributed to forming distorted beliefs about beauty were fashion magazines. Like any teenager, I was collecting fashion magazines being driven by the curiosity of learning how to combine different clothing elements. The problem was that my focus soon changed from how the clothes were matched to how the human models looked. As you will probably guess, this contributed to strengthening the distorted beliefs I already had about beauty.

With these pictures and experience stored in my subconscious, no wonder I used to believe I am far from beautiful. No blue or green eyes, no tiny nose or perfectly shaped chin line. On top of this, when I was meeting a person with,, perfect’’ features I would feel my anger rising and ending up with resending that person. I admit that there were also a lot of judgmental stories I used to hold about people with perfect feature.

Only around the age of 28, I became conscious of the stories that were playing in my mind and what my model of beauty was.

Since then my definition of beauty is that THERE IS NO DEFINITION! People’s features are unique and most of them are exactly how they should be, in accordance with each person’s anatomy. I personally have chosen to not wear make up because I have no desire to cover or modify the look of any of my facial features. They may not be perfect by everyone’s standards but they are perfect by my standards, and this is all that matters.

I am however aware that some people are born perhaps with a feature who is disproportional in volume for example. In this case, I am pro to corrective plastic surgeries if one considers that this feature is generating a massive complex and they cannot be accepted as being okay.

I wouldn’t recommend that a decision to surgically correct something is made before first exploring a personal complex with a therapist or coach.

I am also aware that there are plenty of examples out there of people who made a hobby out of having numerous plastic surgeries. I don’t support this behaviour and believe that working on the mindset with a specialised person as opposed to modifying the body, will be a healthy approach.

Is important to understand that beauty is not defined by a rigid set of criteria and to explore what kind of toxic stories we hold around this area.

We all have personal preferences, however, other people preference will not affect our perception of selves if we don’t hold distorted beliefs and stories around this topic.

If you need help to create your own concept of beauty and clear all the distorted stories around this topic, please feel free to reach out.

I would love to help you!