As some of you reading will know, I have a skincare focussed Instagram account and am feeling inspired to talk about natural skin after seeing some serious realness from the skinstagram community 💛.
Since having my daughter, I’ve become much more conscious about the social media environment I want to create and how that affects the world she grows up in. 🌎
As a child I was super self-conscious about the way I looked (and still am to be honest). As someone with darker skin than the rest of her family, I fell foul of the old Indian adage of ‘fair is beautiful’ and was often told ‘it’s a shame you aren’t a beauty like your mother’ based on nothing more scientific than the quantity of melanin I possessed. I was often told to use makeup several shades lighter than my own, so as to give the appearance of being ‘fair and lovely’, to use lashings of Kajal or Kohl to give my already large brown eyes a more dramatic appearance, when in fact this gave me quite the ashen appearance assigned by a talent poor mortician. My natural look just would not do.
When social media came along, the flawless, filtered and made-up faces played right into all my insecurities and so I readily jumped down rabbit hole of thinking that conformity was the only way to be accepted. Every photo of myself had to be curated, and de-tagged where necessary. A careful exercise in online topiary so that my online profile was just so. At one point I was in adult braces preparing for jaw surgery. As soon as they were off, every photo of myself was de-tagged or deleted. I now feel a sense of sadness that no memories of those 2 years really remain. I look at photos of my 18/19 year old friends (now all in their 30s, yikes) and it’s as if I have been erased from every birthday celebration (even my own) every night out, every Sunday dinner.
Now, I’m not saying I’ve suddenly found a secret reservoir of self belief and have totally given up the travails associated with a bit of slap, but now my daughter has entered my life, it has given me pause for thought of what I want her to grow up understanding as natural beauty. As lovely as a good filter is (who doesn’t love a good filter?), and as beautiful and artistic as make-up can be, they don’t represent #natural faces which can help my daughter and others like her feel just as comfortable in their own skin as that which Charlotte Tilbury (other brands are available 😳) can provide.
Recently I’ve been seeing lots of people proudly pointing out the non-conformist areas of their faces and it’s wonderful to see. Such a a positive message to send to all the secure and insecure teenagers and adults alike that, make-up or no, filter or no, everyone’s skin holds beauty. So, here’s me in all my realness, flaws and all. 💁🏽♀️
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EDB The Skincare Lover 