Last updated on January 24, 2025
Is there such a thing as pretty enough? Are you pretty enough or never enough? Is being beautiful as big a privilege as they say? Who decides what the standard of beauty is? Beauty is a knife and you’re holding it by the blade. What will you do with it?
While reading, listen to: “pretty isn’t pretty” – Olivia Rodrigo
I was around 13 years old and had just started high school when I realized I was not pretty enough. I did not know that realization would lead to such destructive outcomes, but here we are. By the time I graduated high school, I had done everything from starving myself and throwing up to getting a nose job. Still, I was right where I had started: I was still not pretty enough. I am currently in my third year of university, and one thing has not changed. I have not been able to achieve the perfection I have been looking for, no matter what I do. It came to a point where I started asking myself: Is this perfection even achievable? Is there such a thing as pretty enough or am I just fighting to achieve something illusory?
I didn’t have the answers to the questions I needed answered, and truth be told, I needed them answered immediately. I couldn’t keep going down this road with surgeries, weight-loss journeys, diets, and trips to the gym, or I would end up killing myself one way or another. That might be a bit uncomfortable to read, but it is the truth. I was dying, and I needed to stop. But I knew it would be hard to change habits I had gained years and years ago, so the first step would be to accept that this knife called “beauty” that I was holding by the blade was on my neck, and it was about to draw blood.
The Mirror’s Truth
It all begins with that one flaw that you start seeing in your reflection in the mirror. An annoying boy from your 5th-grade science class tells you that you have a big forehead or an ugly nose, and when you get home you run straight to the mirror. Is it true? Is your forehead truly that big? Have people been looking at this huge field of a forehead of yours all this time? Have they been laughing at you behind your back? Why are you realising this just now? What else have people been looking at? What other flaws do you have?
And so it begins. These thoughts linger, shaping the way you see yourself and, eventually, the way you open yourself up to others. They become silent companions. You try to identify all of your flawed features before other people do, just so you can try to hide them before they notice. At first, you get bangs to hide your forehead and oversized clothes to hide your belly. What will you do about that ugly nose of yours though? Wouldn’t a Barbie-like nose suit you? Great news, you can get it! It’ll cost you a couple thousand grand and a few weeks with a cast on your face, but the end result will be worth it! Now that you have the cutest little nose, wouldn’t a defined jawline go well with that? Great news again. A syringe and a couple ml of filler later, your jaw will be as sharp as a knife. While we’re at it, why not add a couple ml to your lips too? It’ll give you the perfect pouty look. Now you can laugh at the faces of the haters. Oh wait… they’re still laughing at you. Apparently, you have a couple pounds to lose. Don’t worry, I’ve got the perfect thing for you. Can I interest you in liposuction?
It never ends.
When Beauty Standards Become a Losing Battle
I did the diets and the nose job and the fillers and the botox. It was when a doctor suggested I get buccal fat removal for a “slimmer and more youthful” look that I realized how far down I had sunk already, and how urgently I needed to get out. I, a 21-year-old girl, was being told that I needed to look more youthful, and that was the most absurd thing I had ever heard. When would it end, I asked myself. When would the doctor look at me and I to the mirror, and think that it was enough? Never. No matter what procedure I would get done, I would never be able to stop looking for more flaws to fix. I was trying to fix something that was not broken. And so are you.
At some point, we have to realize that this illusion of “pretty enough” is just that: an illusion. It can be intoxicating to know that your insecurities can be fixed with a visit to a plastic surgeon, but when you fix the one you currently have, another one will appear. Either now or a couple surgeries later, you will look into the mirror and see the inevitable truth: the surgeries will never make you love yourself. You don’t think you are ugly because of your appearance, you think you are ugly because of the standards that are being put on you. You believe that you need to look a certain way to be loved, and that could not be further from the truth. Someday, you will meet someone who will love your big forehead and your curvy body: only if you learn to love your own self with your big forehead and your curvy body. You have to know that you are enough as you are, for other people to perceive you as enough as you are. If you were to keep going down this road of insecurities and procedures, then I could say that I am almost a hundred percent confident that you will never be able to feel true love. And that is because true love is the way we love ourselves: fiercely, completely, and as we are.
With love,
Lara