Ladies, let’s be real. We’ve all stood in front of the mirror before and scrutinized everything we wish we could change about ourselves. Our hair is too thick, too thin, too straight, or too curly. We want curvy hips, but we also want to be thinner. There’s always something we wish we could change. For me, it’s my freckles and ladies, I have TONS of freckles! Most of the girls I grew up with have thin, shiny blonde hair, blue eyes, and a perfectly clear face while my face looks like a map of the constellations! So to my younger self with my super thick strawberry blonde hair, big brown eyes, and full freckled face, it didn’t seem to make the cut.
My parents championed my freckles and told me they make me look unique. What they didn’t realize is that no kid wants to look “unique.” There were certainly no Barbie dolls that had my unwieldy hair and speckled face, which reinforced my lack of confidence. As a junior high school student, I scanned ads and commercials to see just ONE makeup or skincare commercial with a girl who had freckles, but all I found were pictures of girls who effortlessly washed off their makeup with just a quick splash of water to reveal their perfectly clear porcelain skin. Simply put, my looks are not the idea of what “beautiful” looks like in society. So, what’s a girl got to do? This girl spent hours googling “how to get rid of freckles” and drowning my poor face in heavy coverage foundation to mask those marks as much as I could.
In high school, my workload got bigger. Homework and the need to find time to sleep became an actual thing. And guess what? Suddenly I stopped giving a crap about how I looked. The makeup became minimal and my freckles finally had their time to shine, and that they did! I started getting frequent compliments, “Your freckles are so cute. I wish I had more freckles on my face!” My early response to these compliments were “Well, you can take some of mine!” or “Really? I hate them.” Eventually I realized that the only person hating on my freckles was me, so the self-deprecating responses eventually turned into a simple, “Thank you.”
As cliche as it sounds, I realized that my freckles are what made me stand out in the crowd from every other perfectly clear faced girl. They make me, me! Sure, some days I don’t like them and I’m still low-key mad at the little boy who asked me about why I have “little dirt spots all over my face.”
When it comes down to it, we are given one body to live in, so be kind to it and love it because it does a lot for you! Self-love is a difficult thing to practice, but I can tell you that once you start, life becomes a whole lot easier. And to all my freckled face sisters out there, remember these words from some random person on the street, “A face without freckles is like a sky without stars.”
Sincerely,
A freckled face girl.