Beauty standards are always changing. I’m not the one to follow trends, but it’s getting more and more difficult to close my eyes on things that are in with the constant media coverage of what is popular. We are bombarded with images of celebrities every single day through our social media accounts and endless ads that haunt our every step. It seems that the perfect faces of the models follow our every move. Obviously, it’s no secret that celebrities want to look good and “enhance” their look by different means. There is nothing wrong with wanting to look good; the problem is when these unrealistic norms become their only reality.
I personally feel victimized by Kylie Jenner’s lips because I feel like my own natural lips are now not good enough. This also made me become more self-conscious in general. The saddest blow was when I wanted to make my Bitmoji look like me, so I asked my sister to help me out. After I complained that she chose the thinner lips she explained to me that my lips aren’t as big as Kylie Jenner’s. It’s frustrating that now these unnatural lips are the definition of what fuller lips look like in general.
I have never drawn on my eyebrows, I have never done a cat eye, and I wear mascara about once every three or four months. I don’t use filters on my photos, and I have never even tried to contour. I do this because I feel like I don’t need anything to enrich my look, most of the time I feel comfortable in my own skin. That is until I scroll through my newsfeed and see endless articles on what kind of eyebrows are good for a certain face shape or how different celebrities look better with fuller brows. That also makes me feel extremely self-conscious. I’m bad at makeup and that’s partially the reason why I don’t even attempt to fill in my eyebrows, and I definitely can’t afford to get my brows micro bladed. I have other means of spending my hard earned cash (I go out to eat A LOT). My looks are just not my priority. However, I feel like we are forced to invest in ourselves in order to fit this image of a perfect girl. But won’t we all just look the same at some point then?
It seems there is a trend going on with celebrities posing without makeup and showing what they really look like. However, in reality, do they really look like that if you take off all their eyelash extensions, hair extensions, and lip injections? I understand that they are celebrities and that they have to maintain a certain look in order to keep their status. At the same time, why are they being paraded and praised for going “all natural” with tons of articles saying how awesome it is that they are still beautiful even without the makeup? Too much attention is put on looking good even without makeup and celebrities understand that therefore they end up creating an unrealistic “natural” beauty standard that other girls think is actually normal.
I know that things are not going to change and that celebrities will keep enhancing their looks and other girls will think that they too, should invest money into themselves to look like the people on the posters and magazine covers. There is a certain shift towards being more body positive and I think that’s amazing. I just wish there was a shift towards being face positive and realizing that everyone is different. All I know is that when I don’t see any more eyebrow articles the change for the better is on its way.
Featured image via Seth Doyle on Unsplash
