To All The Beauty Critics I’ve Faced Before
Thank you for your service to humanity. For creating an unachievable ideal that millions worldwide aimlessly strive to achieve.
Thank you for setting such standards of beauty that only glow on the surface, hiding the genuine features of humans.
All of these, which you consider flaws, are lost beneath the heaps of foundation a woman applies to her face to have a smooth, flawless finish.
You have successfully reduced a young, confident girl to an unsure, confused person who wonders if she’s not beautiful when a pimple pops on her skin.
She gets worried. It’s like the end of the world.
Why?
Because of your criticism. Your endless comments you impose on someone when you see them walking confidently in a crowd with a blemished face.
Of course, that’s a crime for you.
Confidence with blemishes or pimples adorning the face?
That’s just impossible by ‘your’ standards of beauty.
You fail to understand that a girl can be comfortable in her skin.
She can love her frizzy, curly hair and her dark or pale skin tone, which is a huge no-no in your opinion.
She can accept her facial hair, ungroomed eyebrows, oily or dry skin, and even the zits, marks, blemishes, or pimples she has.
She can walk around with her head held high.
There’s nothing to be ashamed of.
She doesn’t consider them flaws.
That’s why she’s not entitled to bury all the little attributes that make her, her under piles of different products in an attempt to hide them.
If she wants to, she can.
She can use all the makeup she wants if that helps her feel more confident.
But never because she’s constantly pressured to do so. And especially not when someone else’s opinion is imposed on her.
Still, many congratulations to you; your business is booming.
You’ve stripped many young girls of their self-confidence when you casually point out all the things you think are wrong with her.
While you sip your tea, gossiping about the person right in her face (looking at you, all the toxic aunties), something breaks in the said person.
Slowly, you turn them into timid souls who just want to be liked and appreciated. They lose their essence and forget that they are already beautiful. They never discover what actual beauty is.
Some might be lucky to escape your trap, while most hop on a train to Perfection-Ville, a false oasis in the scorching desert.
They’re left to wander in it endlessly, searching for something that was never there, lost.
And when they finally think they are beautiful after all the procedures, surgeries, and treatments, you are there to laugh in their faces, telling them they still lack something.
To preach to them, be yourself, but not like that.
