About two weeks ago, my boyfriend and I took a beautiful hike to blow off steam and reconnect with nature after a challenging week of midterms. It took us around two and a half hours to reach our destination, and when we did, the view was breathtaking. Across the horizon, we could see the vast forest stretching out, the jagged range of mountains, and the warm sun, so close it seemed we could touch it.
I was standing at the edge of the peak, when I turned around to make a comment about the view, and froze.
My boyfriend had his phone out, and it was pointed at me, ready to take a picture.
They say you were never supposed to see your own face. To some extent, I wish we still had the inability to never see, analyze, judge, over-criticize, and finally come to hate the way we looked.
For me, I’ve always been unhappy with the way I look in photos. This is not an uncommon experience for young women like myself.
But honestly, what prompted us to despise the way we look? Who taught us to believe we were such ugly people?
The people around you can tell you hundreds, thousands, even millions of times that you are beautiful, worthy, loved, stunning, gorgeous — they can pour so much effort into convincing you to see that your face is the result of people who loved each other.
It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t believe it.
Throughout my whole life, I never believed that there was anything remotely wrong with my face. I was just a happy girl, experiencing the ups and downs of life, but never projecting so deeply in myself that I hated to look in the mirror.
Social media brought this mindset to a screeching halt.
Suddenly, my mind was being flooded with idiotic things like “face-card”, “baby botox”, “skinny living” — things I didn’t know even existed. Although I knew that the influencers and creators were showing only a tiny part of their lives, I felt less than, inferior, and allowed myself to fall into the cycle of “what can I improve to look better.”
I especially hated the way I looked in photos. From the perfectly posed, retouched, edited and filtered photos I saw online, to the filters SnapChat forced onto me whenever I opened the app, analyzing my face when I took “regular” pictures led me to one conclusion.
I’m just ugly.
Now, the internet has a fascinating pipeline of one, convincing you there’s something wrong with the way your face looks. And two, selling you a product, aesthetic, solution, or service to “help you out”. Particularly for women, I feel like the internet creates “issues” out of thin air, always forcing you to believe that you’re never enough.
Buy more makeup. Do a morning shed. Drink from an anti-wrinkle straw. Use this anti-aging cream. Make this anti-aging recipe. Gua sha the crap out of your face.
Face-maxing. Bunny, deer or fox pretty? Doe or siren eyes? Personal color analysis. Clean girl. Mob wife core. Blueberry milk nails. iPhone face.
These words hold no meaning, but we give them one. We practice them daily and they run through our minds.
Maybe, just maybe, if you put these into application, you’ll look pretty. But more likely, you’ll lose a lot of time and money. And the irony is, you will still have the same face.
While I’ve come a long way on my journey of recognizing that my face is just that, a face, it can still be hard to remind myself on a daily basis that I am beautiful. Even offline, comparison still runs rampant. Every girl I pass is gorgeous beyond anything, and so appreciating my own unique beauty gets pushed to the back of my mind.
Clean out your feed and only follow/consume content that makes you feel good inside. Remember that someone out there looks at your face and thinks, “wow, she’s really pretty.” Understand that there is no one in this world like you, and that is a wonderful thing.
Please don’t spend too much time picking apart your face, and please don’t waste your money on the products TikTok tries to convince us we need.
Spend time with people who speak kind words to you. And tell yourself how beautiful you are.
Above all, please take lots of pictures. You’ll be thankful you have them one day, so you can remember how your face looked.