‘I’ve always felt on the outside of pretty, looking in’: a beauty writer on how she finally stopped feeling ugly
‘Anita Bhagwandas is really ugly.”This was an anonymous comment left on an online feature 10 years ago, when I was pictured alongside my more conventionally attractive, white colleagues. “Trolls will be trolls,” friends consoled when I told them of the incident.
The website editor said: “These things happen to public-facing women all the time, particularly women of colour,” when I asked her to take the comment down (she did). This was apparently just a sad fact of our life in our technological age, and the consensus was that I should forget all about it. Except that I couldn’t. I couldn’t let the word “ugly”go.
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.
I’ve had a complex relationship with that word my whole life. Growing up a plus-sized, dark-skinned Indian girl in Wales in the 1990s and 2000s, I wanted to look like anyone other than myself. It started with my dolls; I coveted their flaxen hair as I brushed it, wishing my frizzy, unwieldy locks looked the same. But “ugly” was properly introduced to me when I was invited to my first princess party, aged four, when I was denied a princess costume.
“You’re too big for it. Here’s a butterfly outfit,” declared the lady doling out the costumes, after looking me up and down and thrusting some trousers into my hands, along with a flaccidlooking cape contraption.
Being a child, I didn’t have the words to identify the feeling but, decades later, I can still 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 as negative. A seed of anguish was planted. From that moment on, every time a classmate said my frizzy hair was horrible or my arms were hairy, or I was told by a playmate that her mum said she couldn’t play with me any more because I was brown, my feeling of otherness grew. As did my sense of ugliness.
When I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to buy teen mags (the joys of a strict Asian upbringing), so I would scour charity shops and my friends’ reject piles for secondhand copies with beauty tips. I would ask for beauty books for birthdays and spend hours messily melting down lipsticks and mixing my own foundation shades because what I needed wasn’t available in the shops.
Sure, my (now almost-perfect) abil
ity for matching colours was a bonus, but this was teaching me more about beauty standards and the industry than I ever knew. I gleaned that my dark skin needed “colour correcting” when I visited the beauty counters for advice or when hairdressers told me that my curly hair was “tameable”, but only if I would blow-dry it straight.
Every brush stroke became a silent prayer for me to look like the girls around me who were held up as the beauty ideal. Those girls all looked largely the same: white, thin and pretty, everything I was shown I wasn’t. Think Joey Potter in Dawson’s Creek,Marissa Cooper in The OCor Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls,and their wholesome, effortless good looks. I genuinely believed that people were staring at me because I was so deeply unappealing and odd-looking.
This discomfort followed me from my teens to university and into adult life – a constant imaginary friend always there to remind you of your lowly place in the world. It gradually evolved into a toxic obsession with thinness – and all that it promised: success, acceptance and prettiness.
I have, like many others, been on and off diets throughout my life. I’ve fussed over points, carbs, calories and macros, and have measured out cereal so many times I can precisely pour, by eye, a recommended (tiny) 30g portion of Cheerios. I’ve dieted so incessantly that coming off them has felt like freefall; I’ve restricted my intake and conversely eaten everything in sight, so that it feels like a never-ending game of chess, using protein bars and chicken nuggets as pieces.
I then made a pivotal life choice. Where is the worst place you can imagine a broken human obsessed with being thin and beautiful and never quite measuring up might find themselves? You guessed it: women’s fashion magazines.
Some of my work placements in my early 20swent well, but even when the editors praised my hard work or writing, it barely registered. I just couldn’t take in anything good about myself. Other experiences, however, were scarring. At one prestigious women’s title, I spent my long days doing repetitive “returns” of clothes borrowed for shoots to fashion houses and lugging heavy suitcases upstairs, with barely a word from anyone. The office atmosphere was cold and fraught; it felt like insecurity was piped in through the air conditioning.
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.
In my final week of packing up fashion returns, I heard somebody squawk about needing a coat to be returned to a designer urgently. “Send her, she can walk it over,” one of the many sinewy blond editors said, gesturing towards me as if I was a pot plant. Another slightly nicer one interjected: “Let’s send a courier, it’ll be quicker and saves the trip.” But the mean blond couldn’t let it – or me – go: “No, send her. She needs the exercise anyway.” Stunned, I said nothing to being fat-shamed so publicly. I took said package and walked it in the rain for 20 minutes to another building. I didn’t have enough energy left for silent crying that day.
Since that time, I have questioned whether my desire to be part of this industry was a form of self-torture, or akin to Stockholm syndrome – my captor the tiny designer clothes that would never fit me. I was also driven by knowing that the industry should be more inclusive and should offer an alternative to the established order that had kept me – and so many others – excluded from its pages.
As an adult, I’ve tried diligently to “fix” my “ugly” problem. As the saying goes, God loves a trier, and I tried hard – so I’m definitely going to heaven. I’ve embarked on multiple extreme diets, cleanses and detox retreats; I’ve taken appetite suppressants and spent endless hours researching various weightloss surgeries. I have obsessed over beauty products, techniques and treatments.
I’ve also undergone hypnosis and done years of talk therapy; even my degree in philosophy was all about appearance: “What is the existential definition of beauty in classical art?” my dissertation pondered. Yet, no matter how much time and money I spent, the malaise still lingered, hovering like a dementor ready to snatch my selfesteem at any opportunity.
When my then-boyfriend cheated on me, “ugly” was the reason my heartbroken brain came up with for the betrayal (rather than the reality of him simply being a sack of shit). When I narrowly missed out on a dream job despite being overqualified, “not looking the part” was my default reasoning (and not the nepotism that is so often at play in these decisions). However hard I tried to fight it, feeling ugly left nothing untouched; it popped up everywhere, as envy within my friendships, selfdoubt in my relationships, and toxic perfectionism in my work.
To say that navigating “ugly” shaped my life is an understatement. It affected everything, including my career trajectory, which eventually led to me becoming a beauty editor. I had put myself into the very world that I had felt so alienated from. Why? I hoped that being around so much of it would finally rub off on me. Instead, I felt uglier than ever.
Working on the inside of the beauty industry, I started to notice some changes. Around 2010, social media gave people a voice and more control over what magazines and brands were creating for them, eroding the carefully crafted elitism and exclusion that I’d been chipping away at from the inside. Campaigns started to become more inclusive on a surface level (though they still rarely featured anyone genuinely plus size, with disabilities or dark skin) and the beauty product launches I attended finally offered shades of foundation in my skin tone and informed me that instead of trying to fit in, I should feel “empowered”. I didn’t.
Now, consumers were increasingly being told to “love the skin you’re in” or feel like you’re “worth it”. But I’d felt invisible and therefore ugly from my earliest years: a few size-14 models on a catwalk weren’t going to eradicate all of that conditioning. It’s not a magic switch that flips your self-perception to “beautiful” after being told for so long that you’re the opposite.
Why did I still feel like this? Something I hadn’t yet identified was keeping me lodged in this web of self-hatred. I was angry at myself, too – I was well versed in how the capitalist patriarchal agenda has used beauty standards against women as a means of controlling us. Logically, I knew I now had permission to embrace my looks, but ugly was so deeply ingrained in me, it wouldn’t let me go. More than anything else I wanted to be free of its clutches, but there was a missing piece to this exhausting puzzle. That’s why it’s become a fascinating subject to me, simply because I’ve never had it – I’ve always felt on the outside of pretty, looking in.
I finally found some solace – but it wasn’t because of the popular rhetoric of “love yourself as you are”. That never worked for me because it didn’t go deep enough. But when I started to read about how beauty standards were created, who created them and who was holding the puppet strings that are making so many of us feel ugly, things started to gradually shift. Reading about the link between colonisation, class and thinness made things “click” – I wanted so desperately to be thin because of the acceptance thinness promised. So, instead of feeling self-loathing when something in a shop didn’t fit me, I reminded myself that the brands who only stock small sizes are actually defining their “ideal” customer through their actions, and that rather than aspiring to wear their clothes, I actively rejected their narrow version of beauty.
I developed some self-preservation tactics in an effort to counteract the wrongness of the beauty standards I’d been sold my entire life. Now, I employ slow beauty, using products until they’re finished and buying them because I love the smells, design and textures, so it’s more of a pleasurable, sensory experience rather than panicbuying something I’ve been sold as a “jar of hope.” It makes a big difference to your mindset when you switch to using beauty products for joy, rather than using them to look prettier, thinner, younger.
And before I invest in anything expensive (or even invasive), I question why I really want it: why is this being sold to me? What structures of oppression are benefiting from me buying this? Take a costly anti-ageing device that promises to turn back the hands of time. It’s patriarchy and capitalism which benefit from me feeling lacking. Not even younger women are exempt: we’re sold preventive Botox as a passage of womanhood, like a badge attached to a “Congrats, you’re 30” card.
I try to police negative self-talk by catching myself when I feel I look “tired” – a codeword for old – and questioning what exact trigger made me feel this way – whether it was somebody I compared myself with on TV, or something somebody said about my appearance.Once I’ve figured it out, I write down why it made me feel so bad: ageing is a natural process after all. In this case it’s the way women over 40 are so seldom celebrated as desirable. Then I try to create an action around it: by filling my social media feed with women who live life unrestricted by arbitrary definitions of age for inspiration.
AndI now focus on using my makeup for self-expression, and not self-correction – choosing colours and styles that feel authentically me, rather than obsessing about trying to “conceal flaws” or make myself look younger. I am still wearing black glossy eye makeup (even though my lids are a little heavier than when I was in my 20s) because it’s part of my style – I don’t want to stick to a “flattering” neutral palette – that’s just not me, and eyeliner is not age dependent.
Am I fixed? Do I walk around giving myself high fives in wing mirrors and windows? No. But I feel so much more at peace with my appearance and, instead of dwelling on the time lost feeling ugly, I feel fired up instead. So much of what I uncovered in researching my book – about the history of our beauty standards and how they’re insidiously dictated to us – fuelled a sense of injustice within me that made me want to take ownership of my appearance.
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.
How to resist the ‘jar of hope’ impulse buy
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 …
Anita, why do you want it? I think it could help me look a bit younger.
Why? Because I’m starting to look older.
What was the catalyst? I just saw a picture where I looked exhausted and it’s freaking me out.
Why? Because I don’t feel old and I hate being categorised, but society treats women over 35 as if they don’t exist.
OK, but you know why that’s the case though, right? Yes (sigh). Archaic data on fertility, patriarchal views of women’s appearance and the multiple industries that sell youth to women as the sole beauty ideal.
Go deeper – what’s the real structural reason? Because the worse women feel about themselves, the less they’ll achieve, and that way they will stay out of the workforce/world/way.
Who profits? Keeping women feeling small, old, unworthy and ugly supports patriarchy and capitalism. People get rich when women buy stuff they don’t need via the creation of beauty anxiety.
Who isn’t feeling like this? Men – largely speaking. They don’t have the pressure to look under 30 all their lives. Often they’re told they look better with age.
How does this make you feel? Fed up, angry and really done with it. Maybe this is why I’m tired …
Boom! So, is there a non-product-related fix here? I could go to bed earlier, stop dicking about on TikTok until 1am and limit who I follow on social media.
Anything else? I could use the retinol I’ve already spent £60 on first, or try facial massage.
OK – so name three things you can do to change your mindset on this belief right now?
1. I’ll add 10 women my age or older who embrace their age to my social media feed and remove anyone I compare myself negatively with.
2. I’ll watch one TV show or film a week featuring women older than me who I think are awesome. Or spend time with a friend or family member who fits that bill.
3. I’ll make a moodboard of beauty and fashion looks I want to try just because I love them and they represent me. And I’ll try one new thing every week.
Great – still want the gadget? Not as much as before but maybe still a little bit.
Cool – can you wait a month, do all the above and then reassess? Yes, absolutely.
• Photographer’s assistant: Bruce Horak. Hair and makeup: Neusa Neves using Nars and Aveda hair care; Mirror: Serpentis – Verdigris at House of Hackney
• Ugly by Anita Bhagwandas is published by Bonnier Books, £16.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order a copy for £14.78at guardianbookshop.com.Join the author as she discusses her book and untangling modern-day beauty myths with Sali Hughes at a Guardian Live event on 16 March
Every time a classmate said my frizzy hair was horrible or my arms hairy, or a playmate was told not to play with me because I was brown, my feeling of otherness grew