As women, we’re forced to conform to toxic stereotypes of beauty – how can we reclaim our self-worth?

In your book, you write about how the lack of inclusivity in the beauty industry felt very personal and how hard you found it to break the culture of silence around representation. What’s the first thing you would do to make the beauty industry more inclusive?

That’s a really good question. I would educate everyone on the history of beauty standards because I think that’s the biggest issue across the board. No one gets taught at school about the effect colonisation and slavery had on beauty standards, particularly the idealisation of being thin. In terms of diversity, so many brands have gone, “Okay, we’re going to put a person of colour in this advert and we might put an older person in this campaign” to appear to be diverse. What has happened is, often a light-skinned black person will be chosen because they have a proximity to whiteness and, if it’s a plus size or body positivity campaign, it will be someone who is an hourglass shape. It’s like an acceptable, token form of diversity. But I think unless you know why those systems of oppression were created in the first place, and how they play out in very subtle ways, then you can’t really ever truly unpick it and you can’t ever really truly help. It’s my hope that ugly bridges that gap in the middle to give people context as to why they have been made to feel rubbish about their size their entire life and who decided that it was an ugly quality to be fat. When you see one kind of beauty everywhere, you just go, okay, that’s the norm. It might be the Kardashians, it might be on Love Island, it then might be on Instagram. There is a look and even though you might not necessarily aspire to that, elements will still touch your reality and still affect everything that you buy. 

There seems to be a lot of pressure from society to conform to a narrow Eurocentric stereotype of beauty. Do you think the narrative around traditional beauty ideals is changing?

I think beauty ideals are definitely changing, which is great, but it’s definitely not enough. Body positivity has been a huge part of that and it’s changed a lot of my narrative about my own appearance, actually. It’s really nice to be able to buy clothes in the high street now, and that wasn’t always possible even 10 years ago. But I definitely think there are still limitations. There is bias in tech, for example, that favours certain facial characteristics and certain ethnicities. 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. 

You wrote about how the capitalist patriarchal agenda has used beauty standards against women as a means of controlling us. How can we rebel against this and use beauty for self-expression and joy instead?

This is a really tricky one because if you were going to face this argument head on, you would renounce all beauty products and all beauty standards. You’d say, “I’m taking myself out of this.” And I think that can actually be great for a lot of people. What can be really hard, though, is the gap in between. I’m not fixed – I’ve had 30-something years of being told that I need to look a certain way.  You can’t completely wipe your brain clear overnight. But beauty and fashion can be amazing forms of self-expression – that’s the really important thing to focus on. There are practical ways to do that, which I talk about in the book. One way is to focus on the joy that you get from beauty products. It is a mindset shift. When I wake up in the morning and start to do my skincare routine, I’ll be like, “Oh God, my eye bags are really bad today. There’s a bit of hyperpigmentation here. That’s really annoying.” And then it starts off this cycle where you are dissatisfied with yourself as soon as you get up and it’s almost like your brain is just telling you that you’re not good enough as you try to mask, conceal and fix. That is a very different mindset to waking up and telling yourself, “I love the smell of this moisturiser. Or I’m going to use that because I love the texture or the colour.” Gradually over time interrupt those thoughts and switch to the sensorial aspect of beauty products rather than the outcome of making yourself look prettier or younger or thinner. 

I’m really interested in what you call “informed consent” in the book when it comes to beauty treatments, in particular aesthetic tweakments. Can you talk us through exactly what you mean by that?