The Insta-stars making a living from their scars
Three women who overcame battles with body confidence are now helping others to do the same, reports Eleanor Steafel
When Michelle Elman was 15, she decided she was ugly. At her all-girls boarding school, she stuck out like a sore thumb – she was mixed race, bigger than most of her classmates, and bore secret scars all over her body from the multiple operations she had endured in her early teens. She listened day in, day out to her friends agonising about their skin, their hair, the latest diet they were trying – and a wall went up. “Is this all we are?” she thought. “God, this is boring. Count me out.”
Unlike most teenage girls, Michelle understood that there was more to life than beauty. Having been born with a brain tumour, later suffering from hydrocephalus (an excess of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain and spinal cord) and twice suffering from obstructed bowels, She had undergone 15 operations by the time she was 13. “My process was to go ‘you know what, my scars aren’t going anywhere, so I just need to accept them. I’m ugly. Cool, that’s done. Now let’s try to create something with the rest of it.”
She was racked with guilt for having such negative thoughts when she had, against the odds, survived. “I had this belief around my scars that if I talked about it people would notice, so I never spoke about it,” she recalls.
It wasn’t until Michelle was 18, and forging a new life at university, that she finally felt able to tell people about her scars, and deal with the trauma – by the time she was 11 she had seen 30 children die in hospital – that had been lingering under the surface. “God knows how my friends put up with it – once I started, I couldn’t stop.”
Graduating with a degree in psychology from Bristol, Michelle decided to become a life coach, but before long she felt herself becoming drawn to clients who were struggling with body confidence. “One day, I mentioned casually [in a group session] that I’d had some surgeries and mentioned my scars. [A client] said: ‘Why don’t you talk about this? It helps me to know that you’ve been through it as well’.”
The idea of it filtering into Michelle’s professional life remained anxiety-inducing.
It wasn’t until she was on holiday with a friend that she decided to put her money where her mouth was. “My friend said: ‘Just out of interest, how are you going to be a body confidence coach if you won’t wear a bikini?’”
Michelle’s immediate reaction was: “People with scars can’t wear bikinis.” But she vowed to push herself to wear a bikini, and take a picture in it. She posted it on Instagram with the caption: “People with scars can’t wear bikinis” and it went viral. The response from people was overwhelming. It was clear to Michelle that she was on to something. Three and a half years on, Michelle has 124,000 followers on her Instagram account @scarrednotscared. She has published a book called Am I Ugly?, launched a podcast, spoken at countless body positivity events, and delivered a Ted talk in which she and many of the audience members broke down in tears. This kind of overnight popularity is par for the course for influencers like Michelle, who use their visible differences to spread the gospel of body confidence. Lex Gillies (@ talontedlex on Instagram) began building a following as a beauty blogger, gaining a dedicated band of women who devoured her posts about nail art and make-up trends. But she lived in fear that one day someone would ask her: “Why don’t you ever post before pictures?” or “Why do you wear such heavy make-up?” Lex had been living with rosacea (a skin condition that typically affects the face and results in redness and swelling) since she was at university, when doctors eventually diagnosed her but dismissed her requests for help and advice. “What are you complaining about,” one doctor said. “It’s just skin.”
“I just had this really horrible feeling that someone would expose me,” she recalls, “so I decided to do it myself. As soon as I did, I had so many people get in touch with me.” Eight years on, Lex has become an expert in how to use make-up to cover up skin conditions, posting regular before-and-after shots.
It’s a dicey topic, I suggest, as there are some who see covering up your visible differences as fuelling shame, not acceptance. Lex is very clear that this is not the case. “I was just trying to get to a point where my skin wasn’t the first thing people noticed about me. I believe make-up is the thing that can make me myself.”
Though Michelle and Lex now boast huge followings of women who send them daily messages of support, they still have to endure their fair share of trolls (someone recently messaged Lex, saying: “If I looked like you I’d kill myself ”). Skin positivity blogger Em Ford, who has nearly one million followers on Instagram, found fame when she turned the trolling she received for blogging about her adult acne into a viral video. “My acne developed from nowhere,” she says. “After researching and learning how common it was – 80 per cent of people will be affected in their lives – it made sense to talk about it.”
In the video, titled “You Look Disgusting”, Em detailed all the horrendous comments she had received about her appearance. It reached more than 10 million views in the first week. Since then, she has made a BBC documentary about online trolls, and her Youtube channel and beauty blog have been a force for change. In November last year, Em made another viral video, “Redefine Pretty”, interviewing 20 diverse women about their own relationship with their looks; now, the majority of the messages she receives are in support or calls for advice.
“I can’t remember the last negative comment I got on a no-make-up picture,” she says. “After [You Look Disgusting] everything really changed. Now it’s a community of acceptance and a celebration of individuality.”
For all three women, the purpose of sharing their stories about coming to terms with their looks has been to help others. But it’s also been a form of personal healing. For Michelle, the moment when she was finally able to look at pictures of herself in hospital after her surgeries came in the middle of her Ted talk, when they flashed up on the slide show behind her.
“I started crying. The child who needed this, this now exists. I had to wait to accept my body. There are people who go through their entire life and don’t accept themselves.”