Friday Night Wisdom

    I couldn't agree with the girl who made that picture more. A couple of weeks ago I started working on a beauty counter for a pretty well known  make up company with a pretty aggressive sales technique. For various reasons, I no longer work there but this post has less to do with them and more to do with the beauty industry in general. Prepare yourself....this may get ranty!

    Working in a beauty hall and hearing dozens of different sales approaches every day, I've noticed that they all revolve around the same idea: making you feel bad about yourself.

    I get that that's kind of obvious and most places have the decency to at least be subtle about it but that doesn't make it less of a problem. The message pervades everything from the product slogans to the training information. In the training manual of the company I worked for, they had two pictures of the same woman side by side. In one she was bare faced with messy hair, in the other her hair was neatly scraped back and she was fully made up with a bright, red lip. The captions read 'Yuck!' and 'Wow!' respectively. I can't begin to explain all the things wrong with that.

    Make up for me has always been a creative thing, its about having fun and the freedom to be as many different people as I feel like on any given day. It's not the same for everyone, but the core value should stay the same, it should make you feel GOOD above all else, it should help you express who you are or who you want to be, it should bolster your confidence, empower and enhance you.

    But a lipstick isn't going to change your life and if loving yourself enough is something you struggle with, no amount of concealer or eye shadow or mascara is going to change that.

   You are so much more than the shape of your eyebrows, the size of your nose or a birthmark on your cheek! The things we use to torture ourselves are design features, unique selling points, not the 'imperfections' we're encouraged by the industry at large to conceal, paint over and distract from. Not that I don't think make up is a fantastic tool for getting rid of annoying blemishes or helping you to feel better and more in control of something that really knocks your confidence, but you get where I'm going with this.

    With or without make up;

Your worth does NOT begin and end with someone else's definition of what's beautiful! 

    It's about time companies stopped trading on making you feel like it does.

   Sorry about that, but I don't think it gets said nearly enough!

 

Tweet Pin It Now!