Beauty is a weapon, and the lack of beauty is weaponized.
I’ve never been called beautiful in my life. In elementary school, I was the most popular target for bullying. Shy and scared, they knew exactly how to tear me apart. You can imagine all the cliches: paper thrown at me, excluded on the playground, and deluges of name-calling. By the time we were all promoted to middle school, the labels of being fat, ugly, and unlikeable were tossed over me like the worst prom sashes of all time.
Labels and definitions found ways to challenge me. I was ugly. I wasn’t beautiful. But what does it mean to be beautiful, and how can I be beautiful? If you search up the definition, you’re given:
“Pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically / of a very high standard; excellent.”
Before I even got into high school, I declared to the whole world that I, Sienna Villalobos, would never, not ever, touch any form of makeup. I wanted to be a bare-faced beauty. But when I joined color guard my freshman year, makeup was mandatory. Soon enough, eyeliner became second nature, and if I left the house without it, it was the same as going out without pants. I loved makeup. After I got out of color guard, I was a junior and even more obsessed with all the colors I could paint my face with. Still, I wasn’t deserving of the label beautiful. Was my makeup not pleasing to the senses or mind? I was a few pounds down. I was in solid shape. Probably not the highest standard, but was I not close enough? Was I not enough?
There were days where I was okay with calling myself beautiful. But it was also something I was okay with taking away quickly, like if my eyeliner smudged or my hair continued to fight losing battles with the wind. I was especially okay with revoking the title beautiful if I saw someone else who was beautiful, specifically another girl. She was the definition, she deserved the label.
This became extremely common for me to do. Beauty was a zero-sum game. Either you have it or you don’t. I started to believe that no one called me beautiful because they’d seen someone else who was more deserving. There wasn’t enough beauty to go around, definitely not enough for me to have, let alone keep. I could be having the best day of my life, drenched in a smile so bright and wearing clothes that fit me just right, but as soon as I saw someone who I believed was more deserving of the label, I shut myself down and let confidence pass me by.
UC Berkeley, in my humble opinion, has absolutely beautiful women. Women who are strong-willed, confident, and capable of expressing themselves with ease and style. With beauty, there’s so much to gain. Beauty is the ultimate weapon if you can use it properly. At least, that’s what my roommate told me. If you’re not beautiful, she tried to explain to me, then it’s used against you. “Don’t let that be used against you,” she said, and suddenly, beauty felt like a competition and I was going to be the loser.
All of my first semester, I worked on how I could be the most beautiful version of myself. I learned how to make sure my bangs didn’t part too awkwardly, tried out new makeup looks, and threw out much of my wardrobe. I didn’t want to be last place. I didn’t want to be “ugly” anymore. So many of my friends were absolutely gorgeous, and I didn’t know how to go out with them without feeling like a charity case. I hated when they asked for me to be in a picture, because as soon as they’d post it, it’d be revealed to everyone who followed them that they took pity on me.
Of course, this was all insecurity. Insecurity is the deadliest weed. It grows quickly, races around different parts of the mind and body. And when it finally reaches the soul, it’s nearly impossible to get out. I’d been fostering this insecurity for years, and convinced myself I could get rid of it if I just won the label of beautiful once. If I could be deserving of it, then maybe I could convince myself that I wasn’t deserving of being insecure.
This never happened. In college, I did get compliments. I did things that made me happy, like wearing clown makeup or dressing in overly fancy attire. But I never felt good about myself, only the things I did. Still, after making friends and trying to be confident, I deemed myself unworthy of self-affirmations and being beautiful.
In all honesty, this only changed recently. My friend took me out of the dorms to try and get me out of the slump I’d been in. It feels with everything I’ve written so far, I’ve always been in a slump. But they’ve been getting easier to deal with. I have my friends to thank for that. Trinh, my friend, got me all dressed up, took me out to a restaurant, and took pictures of me on a borrowed digi camera. It’s the first time anyone had ever taken pictures of me. We also took pictures together. In every single picture, she’d call me all sorts of flattering names, like cutie, baddie, and beautiful. To me, my friend is much more beautiful than me. But she was willing to share the title. She was happy to. And that’s when I realized I’d made beauty a weapon to be used against me my whole life.
Beauty is not zero-sum. If one person has it, another person can, too. Everyone can have it. Everyone does. Beauty can coexist with itself. Beauty takes on many forms. I am beautiful, you are beautiful. Beauty isn’t something to be won. I understand that more, understand it better than I ever have. After that night, I became more comfortable with self-affirmations. I became comfortable in my own skin. I tossed aside all my old labels, and started to wear the ones that I always dreamed of wearing: the ones that represent who I really am.