Will your eyes be as pretty if you removed the lashes?
Will your chest be popping without the silicone?
Will your hair make waves if the extensions came off?
Will they be enchanted if you showed your true soul?
These are questions I wish every girl asked herself.
I guess it pains me to hear a 12-year-old say that she has to get her eyebrows done so that her peers don’t make fun of her, or a 16-year-old think her world will come to an end if her nails aren’t done for the first day of her last year of high school. (True story.) What have we become? I’ve traveled the world in chipped nail polish and terrible hair, and guess what? I survived. I’ve had the time of my LIFE and needed not a single lip gloss.
There’s a difference between hygiene and cosmetics, by the way. You can look a mess, but still be clean; and you can look like a million bucks, but still be dirty. Hygiene above all!
Girls are spending the their last dollar on the superficial just to look “fly” when they could be flying for real to unknown parts of the world and learn a ton. There’s actual “living one’s best life” in educating oneself.
Oh, I’m guilty of these things. In no way am I makeup-shaming here — I paint my nails, I wear makeup (I actually love makeup!), I die my hair, and I’ve worn false lashes. The difference is I know these beauty trends and tendencies don’t define me. For me, it’s more of a habit than it is a need. I can live without it. It took a while for me to realize it, but I did. It doesn’t help that we don’t usually have many female role models in our culture and on mainstream media saying: YOU DON’T NEED THIS. On the contrary, with their actions they’re telling us that physical appearance is everything and it comes before anything.
More than ever before now, though, we see a lot of women in Hollywood, for example, posting pictures of themselves without makeup; posting pictures of their post-baby bodies (which they shouldn’t need to do!) to let the world know that it is okay to be human, and believe it or not, these things make a difference. I don’t know what it is about humans, but we have a lot of “followers” amongst us who are highly influenced by celebrities and that’s why these messages of body positivity work.
I wish more mainstream Latinas did the same. I wish they worked harder to portray the real versions of themselves and toned down the superficiality a bit.
For now, I’ll keep hoping girls learn to love themselves in their natural form.
While you’re here, take a look at my little book Flat: Living Small in Large America — building thicker skin for the small-busted — for more on beauty standards and body positivity.
