How do we first learn if we're pretty or ugly?
And why is it so damn hard to shake these beliefs as an adult...
Hi gang - I’m a bit under the weather right now, so in lieu of this week’s column, here’s an wee extract from UGLY: Giving Us Back Your Beauty Standards I hope you enjoy it…
Life in grey South Wales was generally fairly uneventful, but a seismic life-changing event was about to happen: I had been invited to my first princess party.
The idea of wearing a fairy-tale dress and feeling like a real princess for the day made me feel giddy. On arrival at my friend’s house, I dutifully queued up to receive my pink princess costume from the sparkly outfit rail, marvelling with excitement at all the other girls wearing them. Even dour little Rhiannon waiting next to me looked like she was about to do a happy wee.
Finally, it was my turn. I looked up at the lady doling out the outfits, waiting expectantly for her to hand me the princess dress of my dreams. She looked me up and down, then turned back to her rail and said, ‘You’re too big for it. Here’s a butterfly outfit,’ before thrusting some trousers into my hands, along with a flaccid-looking cape contraption. A rush of heat came over me as I slunk off into the corner to put them on, sadness and crap wings in tow. Moments later, the photo above was captured.
My heart sank as I looked down at my outfit and the princesses around me, wondering why I was different — aside from not being white, that is. Being a child, I didn’t have the words to identify the feeling but still, decades later, I can feel its searing intensity. I now recognise it as shame; it was the first moment that I felt ‘different’ from those around me, in a way that I could identify was considered negative and unfavourable. After that I lost interest in the party; the elastic wing/cape ensemble dug into my wrists and I was miserable. But I didn’t tell anyone, including my parents. Instead, I went home in the car with an entirely new set of feelings about my appearance. I nursed those emotions, buried them deep, and a thorny seed of anguish was planted: ugly had entered the building.
My rational, now-adult self can see that perhaps the dress-wielder was tired and overwhelmed by a hoard of tiny sugar-fuelled girls clamouring for their princess moment. But my inner child still feels the pain of that experience, even though it was an offhand comment from somebody who meant nothing to me. All it takes is something seemingly innocuous….
Being othered for my appearance planted the seed of ugly that continued to grow into a painful and dysfunctional relationship with my looks as an adult. From that moment on, every time a classmate said my frizzy hair was horrible or my arms were hairy, that feeling I’d first experienced at the party grew. Shame has a way of doing that, it feels unspeakable and all-consuming. That initial incident was a spark that billowed into an entire lifetime of malaise about my appearance that felt like it was intrinsic, as if I was born with its cloying burden.
Except, I wasn’t. None of us are born loathing the way we look, it’s something we learn.
But even before we’re conditioned to decide what’s beautiful and ugly, we’re subject to scrutiny over our appearance and its changes. Everyone coos over a cute, squidgy baby: the dimpled cheeks, the leg rolls, the squish — it’s adorable, right? But if that cuddly babe becomes a chubby toddler, and then evolves to be a chunky child? Suddenly, it’s a problem and a way for us to be marked as different. There’s even a Reddit thread for parents with ‘ugly babies’, seeking support and publicly hoping that their offspring will grow into their ‘big’ noses and ‘large’ heads, or that their eye and hair colour might magically lighten over time (Eurocentric beauty standards never fail to show up). Other threads are dedicated to posting pictures of other people’s ‘ugly’ babies for jest with captions like: (‘put me back in’, ‘the face only a mother can love’, ‘Quasimodo, is that you?’).
I love a well-placed funny as much as the next person, but before we can even walk or talk, there are swathes of people putting a ‘value’ on how we look. Of course, we can’t account for every dark corner of the internet (seriously, where would we even begin?) but the sad fact is that these online forums aren’t so far removed from society’s value system based on appearance and it starts young.
As children, when we hear words like ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, ‘stupid’ or whatever is levelled at us, those words are coming from somewhere — after all, we don’t start life with this vocabulary. When incidents like butterfly-gate occur — which they often do at an alarmingly young age — we receive the message that physically, our appearance isn’t ‘acceptable’ in some way. A friend was called names all through school for having a bigger than ‘average’ nose. (How is that even quantifiable? Is there a secret nose scale we’re judging them against?) Another mentioned that her ‘gappy teeth and sticky-out ears’ were a subject of familial ridicule (#Bants) until she underwent jaw reconstruction and had her ears pinned back. Which sounds exceptionally painful. And it might have been unnecessary, in a society more accepting of a broader range of appearance.
At an impressionable and vulnerable age we’re told implicitly and explicitly how we should look and its importance. Even notable performers, the people we might assume were born with self-confidence, have been subject to agony over their looks. Singer-songwriter/actor Lady Gaga said: ‘I was bullied in school, I felt ugly and my only escape was music.’ Writer and director Lena Dunham posted that: ‘Throughout my teens I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was fucking funny-looking. Potbelly, rabbit teeth, knock knees — I could never seem to get it right and it haunted my every move.’ Actor Uzo Aduba said in an interview: ‘I grew up in a small New England town where the beauty ideal was very traditional and seemingly flawless: blonde hair, blue eyes, legs for days. In my mind, that meant anyone who didn’t look that way was considered unattractive. I started to doubt everything about myself, from my curvy build to the gap in my teeth. I never felt beautiful.’
And even Beyonce says she felt it: ‘Of course I’ve had an ugly period. When I was around 10 or 11, my mother gave me this ugly haircut and I was really, really chubby. So chubby that my family used to all lay me down flat so they could zip up my jeans. It took four of them and I would lie there on the bed while they all got to it.’ You get the gist, although surely the painless answer to Beyoncé’s problems might have just been some bigger jeans? But even global adulation, it seems, doesn’t erase the hurt and memories of being made to feel ugly at some point in childhood.
It’s disturbing to think how early we can learn to feel shame about an aspect of our appearance. This has the capacity to shape our futures because if we think we’re not enough or we’re ugly, we settle for less across every area of our life until that becomes what psychologists term our core belief, or our invisible psychological tagline, that is always lying in wait to trip us up.
Can you pinpoint the earliest moment you felt ugly or different as a child? Those seeds of discomfort are either watered and continue to grow (i.e. reinforced with similar experiences, cultural narratives and peer influence, for example) or they wilt and ideally some healthy self- confidence springs up in their place. My perceived difference was externally marked as shameful and undesirable before I had the chance to even acquaint myself with the idea of there being different body shapes and sizes. So often ugly is handed to us — and we can’t refuse or return it.
According to psychologists, most of our core beliefs are formed by the time we’re seven — yes, seven — so it’s unsurprising that when we’re divided into ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ camps before then, we feel the success or failure associated with that label and it stays with us into adulthood. What we absorb as children — long before we’re old enough to question what we’re seeing and being told — influences the beauty standards we set for ourselves and that we hold others to. Even now, when I hear the word ‘fat’ — even if it’s in a totally different context — I instinctively think somebody is talking about me. It activates childhood taunts and rejection, no matter how much body acceptance work I’ve done.
So, an obvious question to ask as we try to unpick some of the lessons learned at a young age that were unhelpful or even damaging is how did we receive these messages and why did they penetrate so darn deeply?....
I loved this piece but it also makes me feel sad for all the beautiful people who are/were told they are lesser because they don't meet that time’s or region’s beauty standard. And how horrible that that person chose to tell you you couldn't fit in a stretchy princess skirt and cape when you could have!
Hmmm the vulnerability, insight and relatability; so good. I've always thought I was the best looking since I was a kid, it only took me until I was 25 and started going to the gym and taking care of my mental health that I was actually dope and handsome, some people might not agree but that's okay. Your not meant to be everyone's cup of coffee.