Good morning lovelies,
I hope you’re all doing well and thankyou so much to everybody who has followed my blog overnight! The past few days have been crazy since I wrote this post, but the overwhelming and positive feedback and support really tells me what you want from me and what you want to read, so thankyou.
Today, I wanted to discuss somethng that I find quite interesting and perhaps also controversial. Today, I want to discuss what it means, on the world wide web, to be liked. Well, what does it mean?
My thoughts started off when I was listening to Joey Essex on the 2020 series of Celebrity Who Dares Wins. All credits to the guy, he’s not the brightest button in the box. Even if I’ve never met him, it was hard for me to see any appeal, other than that he looked good. Joey recounted the fact that he has 3.2 million Twitter followers. A sizeable feat for sure, but hardly worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Later on in the evening, I watched an episode of First Dates Hotel in which two Instagram users, who had never even met before (but had liked and followed each other for a while) admitted that they were drawn to each other. Both had a pretty obvious false tan, both wore false eyelashes and both had fairly obvious lip fillers. When I tried false eyelashes, I looked like real-life sized version of Mrs Piggy. Definitely not such a good look!
So what does all of this correlate to and why am I discussing this? Well you see, it had me wondering if this is what it really means to be liked and if it’s what it means to be popular on social media. One would surely think that popularity would be based on who we are as people and not the products we use or the clothes we wear, but sadly, it seems, that isn’t the case.
Very recently, I got into a discussion on Slowly with a young man from France. We discussed many things, but the real bug-bear was his stance on cosmetics and women. According to him, women are beautiful, but women are more beautiful if they wear make-up.
Oof.
How can you can you call yourself a feminist and say that women would be more beautiful if they’d just wore make-up. How can you, really?
I have never been a ‘puffs & potions’ kind of girl. I clean my teeth, wash and brush my hair, clean my face and I’m out of the door. I’m bare-faced and natural. If I maintain my eyebrows, it’s been a good day. That’s not to say that I don’t believe there to be a standard to beauty, but if it takes you an hour or more each day to apply your ‘face’ and you can’t leave your home without it, then you have far bigger problems beyond matching your foundation to your concealer. Most frequently, behind layers of product and thousands of pounds worth of cosmetic surgery, is a deeply insecure young man or woman who just wants to be loved.
Are we really liking people now for concealing the bits they don’t like about themselves because of a preconceived notion of ‘beauty’? Are we really liking people now for what they look like or the brands they use and not the ideas or opinions that they put forward?
That, my friends, is a tragedy.
I’ve been told before that I am ‘not my type’, and that’s fine, because for plenty of other people, I am their type. I can hold down an engaging conversation and I’d like to think that I’m fun to be around. So what if I’ve got an acne flare-up, don’t we all? We are part of nature, and nature can be both ugly and beautiful, depending entirely how you look at it.
In the midst of this Coronavirus pandemic, one of the biggest sources of anxiety has been the lack of availability to beauty treatments. False tans, teeth whitening and hair stylists have all been put on the back burner in our Westernised society, all as part of efforts to avoid spreading the virus. My only hope is that, as this pandemic ends, more and more young people will find strength in taking a good long look in the mirror and finally realise who they are, and confident, radiant natural beauty will yet prevail. You don’t need to spend thousands of pounds on looking good, you are perfect, just as you are.
Until next time,
Stay safe & have fun,
Helen xx
