Ugly: Giving us back our beauty standards

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One of my favourite games as a child growing up in Wales was directing doll photo shoots, an odd premonition into my future career directing beauty editorials for magazines. The star of my glamorous imaginary shoots was Barbie, naturally. You're suddenly thrown from this long history – or an entire lifetime – of being told you're ugly to then all of a sudden being told you can love yourself. There's a huge chasm between those two things and it's hard to flip that switch and switch your entire idea and vision of yourself overnight. I think that's what a lot of people are expected to do and it can feel quite jarring to see people who are so comfortable with themselves and not feel like that yourself and wonder why you don't.

Life's struggles can be as indiscriminate as blistering good looks and downsides like being stereotyped as 'just a pretty face' shouldn't be overlooked. Naturally, there are counterpoints to those arguments too but the point is, pretty privilege is as complex and in need of continuous evaluation as any deep-rooted societal conditioning. What can we do about it? Anita Bhagwandas: ‘When I started to read about beauty standards, who created them and held the strings, things started to shift.’ Photograph: Kellie French/The Guardian Why? Because I don’t feel old and I hate being categorised, but society treats women over 35 as if they don’t exist. I’d been quiet, but polite and as helpful as possible, often staying late to get it all done. By the end of that stint, there was nothing left of me. I spent my lunch breaks in the nearby park silently crying (being able to be miserable inaudibly was a key skill for working on women’s magazines) and couldn’t wait for it to be over.

“People are upset by Madonna’s new face because it is, on some level, exposing the truth: that antiaging is an inhuman goal, and attempting to antiage—or age gracefully—actually takes an incredible amount of effort.”

As comprehensive as it was, it only touched upon hirsutism in women. More in this would have been appreciated.

This was not new information to me; I’d always felt resoundingly unattractive when it came to my appearance. And now, here was the proof for everyone to see. Had the troll criticised my writing, called me “weird-looking”, even the customary “fat bitch” or one of the similar insults I’d received before, perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite so rattled, but here was an online confirmation from a stranger of how I really felt about myself. This was indisputable truth: I was ugly. None of us are immune to the pressures put on us to remain ageless, but I know that before I even consider getting anything tweaked again, it won't be a flippant decision. Feeling ugly isn’t an intrinsic part of our experience, it’s been put there by those who reap the rewards of it, and by industries that hold up an unattainable version of beauty as the standard. As is so often the case, getting tweaked isn’t the cure-all it’s sold to us as, because the system that’s selling it to us is what’s really broken.

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These days, before buying anything, I ask myself a series of questions to combat marketing and societal pressure. Let’s take a face-massaging device … The ‘jar of hope’ is hard to resist, but we can and should. Photograph: Getty Images Pretty much everyone these days has given cosmetic intervention at least a passing thought. How can we not? It’s fired at us from every conceivable direction. Reality TV hawks it, social media sells it to us as a route to looking ‘flawless’, celebrities talk about their ‘good genes’ while we strongly suspect they’ve had something done. It is everywhere. Which has given us the mindset that ‘everyone has done it’ and ‘it’s no big deal’ — in fact, most of us probably either have, or know several people who have had, some ‘work’ done via any number of non-surgical, cosmetic ‘tweakments’ now on offer. She continued, "With her obvious aesthetic interventions, Madonna’s effort and her desperation for youth are on full display. That not only violates the rules of ‘aging gracefully’; it violates the (false) code of ethics embedded in beauty culture. For example: When plastic surgery is subtle, we call it good work. When plastic surgery is obvious, we call it bad work. The message is, a good woman with good work conceals the labor they perform to make the construct of womanhood seem natural. Madonna is being judged as a bad woman with bad work for exposing the construct of womanhood as unnatural.”

We aren’t responsible for everything that’s come before us – but we are responsible for what we do now, and the changes we can all make to shift archaic narratives. Considering where whiteness might be ruling your beauty standards and routines – no matter what your heritage – is a great starting point. This is when I started doing research into where our beauty trends come from and the different things that affect them, from politics to colonisation to class – it was a real turning point for me. That's why I wrote the book, to make sense of that void (or chasm) in the middle."Perhaps the biggest shift was learning why I’d reduced my self-worth to being entirely defined by how I look, and that made me realise how imperative it was to root my self-esteem elsewhere, in the qualities that really define me – my character and positive traits. Because ugly is an ever-changing, politically charged construct – and the biggest lesson I’ve learned is never to trust those binary categories, “pretty” and “ugly”, don’t actually exist. Most crucially, have a word with yourself, won't you? Question your own interactions with and judgments of others – and of course of yourself, because oppressive beauty standards don't do any of us any favors. "We all deserve to be treated well and paid fairly as our birthright, and it’s everyone's job to help create standards of beauty that are much more inclusive," adds Bhagwandas. We all have the power to help make that happen. I know I’d like to find another way to approach ageing that’s akin to my mum’s perspective; one that means a birthday milestone feels like a gain and not a loss (for my self-worth or my collagen levels). I want to age with hope, freedom and joy for what’s to come, and to free up that part of my brain that was reserved for ‘anti-ageing’ to celebrate myself, my evolving appearance and the privilege of living. Orbach notes that the labor of making one’s aesthetic labor invisible is “so integrated into the take up of femininity that we may be ignorant of the processes we engage in. We are encouraged to translate the work of doing so into the categories of ‘fun,’ of being ‘healthy,’ and of ‘looking after ourselves.’” We've all had those moments. The ones where you look in the mirror and nothing feels ok. For Anita Bhagwandas, this started when she was a child and it created an enduring internal torment about her looks.