TikTok was good for my self-esteem. I know! I could be the only person in the world for whom that’s true. It’s a stomach-churningly visual app, haunting users with its filters, comparisons, and constant body checking. But posting? For me at least, posting has been a different story.
The ugly came early and excruciatingly when I started the account. Aged 16 in lockdown equipped with a Huawei phone and bleached dip-dye, I quickly learnt that video formats don’t offer the security of photos. Try it—film yourself talking passionately for a minute or so. Then try and screenshot at a point where you look nice. It’s a trick! You won’t be able to find a tolerably attractive facial expression, not for one still moment in the entire video. Your eyes will squint and your mouth will warp; your chin will recede and the lighting will flatten or expand areas you’d prefer it not to. When you’ve accepted the look, the voice comes next. Most people hate their voice recorded. You’ll find yourself nasal, annoyed, grating, overly posh or not posh enough, your sentences smashed together, tumbling over words, sometimes borderline idiotic. I’m totally desensitised.
The ugly, as we’re discussing it, refers to the nooks and crannies that complicate your perception of your own beauty. Ugly here is an internal term, looking at the ways we see our own faces and bodies and cringe at the striking realisation we do not look how we want to or expect to be perceived.
“Your eyes will squint and your mouth will warp, your chin will recede, and lighting will flatten or expand areas you’d prefer it not to”
So for our purposes, the ugly is an internal thing, but it’s of course reflected back and forth between you and the social world you inhabit. I avoid pretty privilege conversations as much as possible online because they’re flat and unproductive. The term veils a much wider problematising of what it means to be looked at, what looking does and how it affects our treatment of one another. But it’s an important thing to acknowledge here. It would be irresponsible and stupid to claim that you can change how others will treat your appearance using the methods I’m about to outline—they’re about you, and how you treat yourself. But for every comment someone else might make about your appearance, you probably make dozens of assessments about yourself. If you can audit those assessments, you will probably have a much more pleasant everyday experience.
The ugly is inevitable. For me it’s in videos, but everyone finds it somewhere—catching themselves in a mirror without warning, upset by what they see; a friend describing their nose, or hair, or skin in ways they don’t see themselves; a piece of clothing fitting differently to how it did on the model, or on their very own body this time last year.
Quiz: do you need to get ugly?
You have a few options to deal with the ugly.
First, you can simply never face the ugly. Do everything you can to avoid it. Stay on the safe side of the fence: photographs you can control, untag yourself from unflattering posts by friends, hide yourself behind reams of hair and never go to the corner shop without concealer on. Teenagers often pick this method up, covering their faces in photographs or refusing to smile in order to ruin the picture, ensuring it never goes anywhere at all.
As people age they accept the occasional ugly, eventually realising it’s not that deep for your right-cheek-cleft to seem a little asymmetric. But they don’t go so far as to post those photos themselves, for example. This leads to another option: balance the ugly with the pretty. Others can post the unflattering pictures of you, but as long as you provide enough evidence of your own beauty, everyone has to accept it. I call this the “remember this?” method, copyrighted by the token full-body picture many will post within a dump of a holiday or outing, just to remind you that actually, their curves do fall in perfect shapes, even if it may not look as such in the group shots. Selfie enthusiasts are big into this method.
“For every comment someone else might make about your appearance, you probably make dozens of assessments about yourself”
The final method is acceptance. It’s transformed my life. If I wanted to achieve my dreams, I could not be pretty. That’s what I learnt. The ugliness would invade most moments and I had to accept that, completely and with little resistance, to do what I wanted to do. I took up a new way of perceiving myself. Mum likes to say that people look “nice”, meaning they’ve dressed up or look particularly good that day, rather than “pretty”, referring to some natural, unchangeable trait. When I pointed it out, she remembered a parenting book advising her not to talk about her (then newborn) daughter’s appearance. It’s nice to look nice, but it’s the exception, not the rule. The ugly proliferates even then, in wobbly makeup or stains on your dress, and that’s absolutely fine. “Nice”ness can even have a bit of ugly in it, because “nice”ness is not the same as beauty. “Nice”ness refers to effort, mostly, not achievement. And understanding effort to be a more attractive quality than achievement can do wonders for your own motivation to put effort into things in your life.
You’re self-obsessed, the ugliest thing of all
How much time do you spend thinking about your appearance in a day? The Independent thinks you spend an hour and a half each day worrying about what you look like. The majority of people under 25 (in 2021, by the way, when the study was conducted) have avoided social occasions because of blemishes.
Dan Frommer crunched some numbers this year and here’s what he found:
The others are older, yes, and more likely to have children and experience lives that make appearance the least on their worries. But other correlations show that it’s not just youth putting young people in front of their mirrors. TikTok users plan to spend more on beauty and “personal care” this year than last according to the same research, and Australian researchers found last year that women who spend as little as 10 minutes on TikTok feel less satisfied with their bodies than others who don’t.
“Understanding effort to be a more attractive quality than achievement can do wonders for your own motivation to put effort into things in your life”
Note: the following steps may genuinely make you uglier. Or at least, you will allow other people to see you in ways you control less. Giving up control on the things it takes effort to control is the number one way after ensuring you are fed, have slept, and have consumed nutrients, to unlock more effort you can then put into other things.
Try as you might, you can’t change your lot (or at least, shouldn’t)
Don’t do this if you’re fragile enough it might break you. Sit in front of a mirror. Look at each element of your face for a good long while. That’s you, yeah? It’s not changing, with the exception of a significant nose-break or some timely jowl-sinking. Enjoy it for a minute. Breathe in, out.
It feels simple, but we fail this test constantly. Buying dresses online, fooled by the body of the model. Asking the hairdresser for a cut that looks fantastic…on somebody else’s features. Comparing ourselves to influencers who look nothing like us. We’re perpetually deluded by our own faces and bodies, thinking they can morph into other people’s. Give it up. Sadly you can only do this by making the mistake enough times to learn, wailing about the dress and cringing at the haircut. And at some point you’ll look in the mirror, sigh and finally see it. That’s you—for good or for bad.
“For every comment anyone else might make about your appearance, you probably make dozens of assessments about yourself”
Stop kidding yourself
One of the scariest parts of the appearance-obsessed generation we’ve found ourselves in is how much we dress up that obsession in bows and whistles of “feeling good about ourselves”. Influencers bang on about being their “best selves” and “showing up for yourself”; trends showing post-relationship or glowing up makeovers mix together audios about self-improvement, and visuals of new hair colours and different body shapes a few years apart. In some cases, the change is quite literally that of a child to an adult, sending clear signals to young teenagers that in order to “glow up”, they must start impersonating adulthood in all its shallow, dangerous ways—and quickly.
Why do you feel good when you dress up? There are many reasons and they’re not all harmful. I didn’t think that much at all about shaving my legs (despite, in retrospect, a huge amount of gendered online discourse about the topic at the time) until I dated somebody who didn’t, a fact I had utterly no thoughts on in regards to them. But it did make me think about my own habits. What was it about this process that made me “feel good”? I realised I didn’t particularly care what my legs looked like, especially as floaty maxi skirts hurtled into the fashion mainstream. But I liked how the process felt; it correlated with washing my hair, something that fixed a huge majority of my small life problems (I have a Hello! scrap on my wall reading: “when in doubt, wash your hair”—it’s never been wrong), and it meant spending time by myself, something I’m not in the habit of often, with music on and nice-smelling soaps. It was ritual. Leg-shaving query solved, I moved on with my life, legs bare but with more ethical confidence now.
So when I say this, I don’t mean throw away every shallow thought you’ve ever had about yourself. It’s nice to look nice! That’s not a crime. But pay attention to why exactly things do feel nice. If you know why you care about things, you can decide how you feel about that caring effort you’re putting in. Sometimes, these reasons can feel quite uncomfortable. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know them.
Find your “backstage”
This is the place where nobody is looking. Sadly, the only place like this for a lot of people is when you’re utterly alone, and there are no eyes to look even if they wanted to. This is a damn shame and one you should avoid if possible. Perhaps I should rephrase this. Step 3: make your “backstage”.
I’m lucky to have a family who are very sensible and generally appearance-comment-averse; they are also lovely, which helps. When I find myself with them on holidays and the like, where we only know each other, that’s my backstage. This means my outfits can repeat, and be unflattering but comfortable. I’m not wearing any makeup most of the time. I walk around with the confidence that nobody, or at least nobody whose opinion on my appearance I care about, is watching.
“You can decide how you feel about the effort you’re putting in. Sometimes, these reasons can feel quite uncomfortable. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know them”
Your backstage is vital for a few reasons. Firstly, having an escape from the running internal calculator of how you look to any particular person in the room is a huge relief and frees up your mind to think about other things. But also, it allows you to reflect on the appearance practices you genuinely do because you enjoy them and like how they look, rather than because of a particular external pressure (that’s not to say external pressure is necessarily a bad thing, by the way, although it often is dangerous. Humans are social creatures and there’s a reason we are easily influenced by the impressions of others. But it’s good to boil down exactly why we do the things we do, just like we did in the last step).
At my backstage, I still change out of my pyjamas every day, even though I wouldn’t necessarily have to. I like picking out outfits and I like the feeling of wearing “real” clothing; it makes me feel ready for the day, and distinguishes the days from the nights. Included in that, I spray on perfume and I put in big, thin gold hoops I’m really into at the moment. The perfume is a sensory experience I enjoy and works similarly to how I realised shaving my legs works, it’s a readiness ritual that makes me feel like I’m caring for myself. I’m also a bit of a homebody, and when I’m away it’s nice to have a scent I associate with myself at home. I like jewellery, how it glitters and feels, and makes me feel more complete.
But I don’t usually put on any makeup. I quickly realised that I don’t associate makeup at all with relaxation, even relaxation that I might be happy do in jeans and hoops. Makeup is a going-out thing for me, the narrative not-like-other-girls-girls in 2000s movies defamed for the rest of us. I take this realisation back home with me, and notice that if I have the urge to put on makeup before something, it’s because I’m steeling myself for some kind of discomfort—whether that be feeling more prepared for a workday with my eyebrows done, or pairing the adventures of an evening with lipstick. Lipstick is the most “done” of all for me, I realised. Again, having equipment to feel done and ready for the external world is not at all a bad thing, and in many cases I feel my best and most confident in lipstick—that’s why it works as armour in some ways. But it’s good to know why you have the equipment, and what you’re equipping yourself for. If I felt like I needed to chuck on lipstick before going to the shops, I might start worrying about my self-esteem. Why has the shops become somewhere I need to steel myself for?
“We dress up our obsession with appearance in bows and whistles of “feeling good about ourselves””
Find your “stage”
So you’ve got your backstage. But where’s your stage? This is possibly the most uncomfortable tip of all, because it actually involves people looking at you. But it’s what you have to get used to. This is your ugliness desensitisation therapy, and you will be at your most powerful when you get the hang of it.
You know, or at least can feel, what your ugly looks like to you. Now you’ve got to find somewhere where people are looking and put your ugly there. I did this accidentally and to an extreme extent by projecting my face rain or shine to thousands of people on the internet for five years. You don’t have to go this far (although if you have or do, please get in touch! I’d love to hear a case study that isn’t me). But you’ve probably chosen in the past not to post a group photo, even though it’s lovely, because you’re not happy with your face or body in it. Post it. You might feel odd going to your workplace without your eyebrows done. Do it. You may even want to go to a place someone you fancy will be in an unflattering top or go to your local when you’re visibly hungover. Places where you think people will notice.
“If I felt like I needed to chuck on lipstick before going to the shops, I might start worrying about my self-esteem”
Doing this will be deeply uncomfortable at first and likely will never be a pleasurable experience. It’s not meant to be! Your goal is not to discard all care for your appearance. It’s to notice that people don’t notice, and if they do, they rarely mind and don’t think as differently about you as you think about yourself. I felt terrible once in an outfit, and a coworker to whom I was stressing about the topic said, “what’s different compared to usual?”. At first, a deeply insulting sentiment, but it showed me just how little people really pay attention.
Getting the hang of this also allows you to discard appearance-based thoughts when they’re inconvenient or not possible. You will never put eyeliner on before giving birth or find yourself paralysed in crisis because you were seen by someone important with frizzy hair, because you’ve managed to take stock of the situation in advance by desensitising yourself in contexts that don’t matter all that much. Hopefully, you can find that it’s nice to look nice and not the end of the world if you don’t. Embrace the ugly! It’s good for you.