We’re up against industries worth billions, and millennia of raising girls on skincare and diets, advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith writes. When things do feel wobbly, smaller interventions might stop the scrutiny cycle
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How can I stop fixating so much on my appearance? I’m a woman in my late 30s and recently a photo taken in a professional context has sent me spiralling about how I appear to others. I find myself poring over photos for evidence that I’m either ugly or beautiful. In reality I know I’m pretty average looking and the way I look hasn’t held me back from finding a loving partner or living a meaningful life – so it shouldn’t matter. And yet when my confidence wobbles or my mood is low, it’s my physical appearance that obsesses me. How can I de-centre the importance of looks?
Eleanor says: Lately I’ve been getting a lot of ads for cosmetic surgeries; I guess the algorithm ghost thinks I’d like some. But I keep having this experience where I look at the proudly presented “before and after” photos and feel a poignant fondness for the woman on the left, now erased. Sometimes she reminds me of the women who raised me. My teachers and my relatives and my friends’ mothers – good, loving, twinkly-eyed women who taught me how to read and make cakes and laugh and aspire. The “before” women kind of recall them, at various points in their middle-to-old age. But if the women I’ve known had lines on their faces or “saggy” necks – it besmirches them to even talk about them like this – it’s only in slightly seeing their echos in these photos, labelled as faults, that it’s ever occurred to me to notice. I’m sure it’s the same for you with the women who played these roles in your life: we just do not evaluate them on grounds of appearance. It would be a stupid misunderstanding of their value to do so. And of course, because of that, we think they’re just beautiful. I miss those echos in the “after”.
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