Ugly: Giving us back our beauty standards

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Having already noticed the book’s undeniable impact on my own everyday life, and with a new understanding of Anita Bhagwandas’ intentions being exactly this, I can’t help but feel Ugly has potential to be a powerful tool in dismantling this repetitious and outdated notion of unattainable beauty. Pretty Girl reappeared in many guises in the TV I watched. She manifested as Kelly Kapowski in Saved by the Bell (it always irked me, even as a kid, that the only person of colour on the show, Lisa, never had a serious love interest; what does that tell its teen audience?). As a child, Anita Bhagwandas, second from left, saw that the heroines in her favourite TV shows looked nothing like her (Photo: Supplied) Bhagwandas continues, “Our society does have a real issue with older women owning their bodies and embodying their sexuality—because if they do, it’s seen as subversive and threatening to patriarchal norms.” My mum has never mentioned ageing to me. She’s never bemoaned her age, the emergence of grey hairs, skin or body changes. She doesn’t care about anti-ageing creams or treatments. None of my relatives have either, even those closer to my age. Ageing woes just don’t exist for them, and yet, for me, it’s been an unwelcome foe since my late teens, waiting for its opportunity to strike. The reason for this disparity, I think, could be a cultural issue. Because the only difference between my mum, my relatives, and me is that they grew up in India and I grew up in the UK.

Ugly” is such a loaded word, isn't it? And interestingly, it's an insult that's rarely weaponised against men…I wouldn't say I stopped hating the way I look but this book helped me make a significant steps towards just accepting myself the way that I am. The author’s pre-set experience has added value to the writing process: ‘I’ve worked on the inside of the industry, I’ve got a very unique insight into how so many parts of it work. The personal experiences I explore in the book bring together the elements of politics, history, science and psychology of beauty standards,’ she explains.

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 self-esteem at any opportunity. A good book makes you think and reflect. This book did that for me. I started with skepticism and a touch of boredom. A bit of dismissal and denial followed. But as I kept reading I found my thoughts and attitudes shift. And yes, I even learnt a thing or two. Now that’s a good book! Unfortunately, when beauty standards begin to change, the different systems of oppression that control them work harder and they just become more insidious. That's why we need to be able to police them and take ourselves away from things that might be causing us harm. 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

“People are upset by Madonna’s new face because it is, on some level, exposing the truth: that antiaging is an inhuman goal, and attempting to antiage—or age gracefully—actually takes an incredible amount of effort.”

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.

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. 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. Anita Bhagwandas: ‘When I started to read about beauty standards, who created them and held the strings, things started to shift.’ Photograph: Kellie French/The Guardian

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Knowing where beauty standards come from and why, means we can help those around us. When our friends obsess about their appearance we can gently remind them that they’re more than their looks - but women have been conditioned to think pretty is a part of their personality - and it isn't. Orbach continues, “We can see this same concept more clearly in trends like no-makeup makeup and the clean-girl look. In both instances, women are expected to perform the labor of applying cosmetics and then the labor of making those cosmetics seem nonexistent. ‘Aging gracefully’ is much the same! We’re encouraged to participate in the system but also, to make it appear as if we aren’t participating in the system at all.”