Recently, I turned 20. Entering a new decade of my life prompted a series of questions and reflections that led me to a point where my social media feed was inundated with women giving the advice they wished they had known in their young adulthood and the self-care habits they wished they had started earlier. Many of these tips related to skincare, an area of my life that up until recently, I had been pretty much completely ignoring. But after seeing hordes of online advice recommending that people start taking better care of their skin at an earlier age, I decided maybe it was time to make a change.
As I began using nightly moisturizer at the end of my pre-bed routine, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d opened Pandora’s box. As I applied the lotion, I found myself compulsively studying every blemish, wrinkle, and mark on my face. In adding to my self-care routine, I worried that I might have just drawn my attention to a whole new assortment of insecurities that had never occurred to me before.
As I wondered if this physical self-care had taken a toll on my mental/emotional self-care, I began to pay more critical attention to the self-care content that filled my social media, noticing a notable divide among the self-care content I was encountering; there was content that focused on well-being, and there was content that focused on insecurity. With my recognition of the latter, I began to realize just how many self-proclaimed self-care influencers benefitted from drawing people’s attention to new insecurities.Â
I first noticed this divide in an unexpected niche of self-care videos: influencers promoting using SPF.
I will admit, I have never been a daily SPF wearer. I will wear sunscreen with plenty of SPF when I’m spending time outdoors in the summer. But in the winter, when I’m spending plenty of overcast Scottish days inside acting as if I haven’t seen the sun in years, I have usually ignored advice to apply SPF in the mornings. Whenever I have shared this with my friends who dutifully put on their daily SPF, they seem horrified. They rightfully don’t understand why I wouldn’t take this simple step to lower my chances of developing skin cancer in the future. Because of the long-term health benefits they have pointed out, applying SPF and protecting my skin is a practice that can very clearly be categorized as self-care.
So at first, it seemed completely logical to me that the importance of wearing daily sunscreen was frequently emphasized in social media skin-care content. However, I began noticing that in certain creators’ videos, SPF was presented not as a valuable tool for protecting your skin from cancer, but as an essential tool for protecting your skin from showing signs of ageing.Â
Beyond just recommending sunscreen, many of these influencers recommended avoiding the sun as much as possible to protect your skin from signs of ageing.Â
This was the moment when I really began to reevaluate just exactly what these influencers meant when they talked about self-care. From my perspective, staying out of the sun didn’t seem like self-care, it seemed like it would deprive people of the direct health benefits sunlight provides. To me, this instead seemed like advice that was rooted in people’s (particularly women’s) societally ingrained insecurities about showing signs of naturally ageing.
This realization about these SPF videos helped me recognize the divide in the rest of the self-care content I was interacting with. This phenomenon was by no means limited to skin-care influencers. The self-care content I was watching about topics like exercise and cooking had similar issues. Certain videos focused on how to take care of health and overall quality of life by exercising or cooking a certain way, and some videos focused on how these activities help viewers achieve a certain look.
I began to wonder if while I was looking for self-care content with the intention of keeping myself healthy and happy, the prevalence of insecurity-based self-care content consciously or subconsciously impacted my self-image. I found myself again asking if I was better off not worrying about self-care at all.
Instead, I’ve landed (for now) on the answer that I can’t practice physical self-care alone. I have to remind myself to practice mental and emotional self-care as well. I can critically engage with the self-care content I consume, choosing to watch what aligns with my personal goals and choosing to skip the content that’s designed to capitalize off/draw attention to my insecurities. I have to actively remind myself of the reasons I’m practising self-care: for my health, and for my quality of life. I have to remind myself that I can practice physical self-care that might remind me of my physical imperfections and sources of potential insecurities, while simultaneously practising the mental and emotional self-care that helps me not get stuck on those insecurities. As I apply my nightly moisturizer and daily SPF, I can remind myself it’s not about hating the creases on my face, but instead, it’s about actively investing in my own health and well-being. I can ensure that I’m practising self-care not motivated by insecurity but instead motivated by self-love.