Hola, I’m Kate.
I’ve been a makeup artist for 22 years, and nearly every time a client sits in my chair they almost immediately begin the conversation with a self-deprecating apology about their face - sorry my eyebrows are a mess, sorry about the pimples on my chin, sorry my skin has been a mess lately, sorry about my wrinkles - as if there’s a preconceived notion that I’ll be judging them because they don’t have what they perceive **as a perfect face.
Makeup to some is a very superficial thing, but in my two-decades-long career, I’ve seen the power it holds in completely transforming not just the way someone looks, but the persona that they embody. Makeup has the incredible power of helping you step into your alter ego, entering a room (pre-makeup) feeling unworthy but leaving it (post-makeup) feeling like the most confident person in the world.
Makeup does many things, helps you feel put together and polished before you go off to work, creates a specific vibe to go with a look you’re personifying for a night out, allows you to get into character for Halloween, and it can allow you to express yourself through artistically applied colours and textures.
But one of the other main things it does, for so many people, is it gives you the means to conceal, camouflage, counteract or enhance parts of your face that you’ve grown not to like. The things that when you look in the mirror you criticise - I hate the bags under my eyes, my pimples are so gross, my pores are so huge, I’m embarrassed by my rosacea.
But why, when you look at these parts of your face in the mirror, are your thoughts so negative and critical?
It’s because, throughout your life, the world around you has conditioned your beautiful, impressionable mind to think that if you don’t fit into the perfect, flawless skin, thin-bodied, thick-haired mould, you’re gross, weird, un-pretty, not beautiful and this conditioning unconsciously leads you to feel unworthy and not enough. That your physical appearance equates to your worth.
This social conditioning extends beyond the face; no part of our bodies has been able to escape being cast to a standard of perfection, not our elbows, our fingernails, our eyelashes or our hairlines.
Commentary about the way we look is prevalent in our society, and it’s a very dangerous topic of conversation. Sexism, racism, fatphobia, ageism and capitalism are rife in our culture and reinforce the belief that your body isn’t good enough. These messages create a culture where thinness is equated with beauty, success, and desirability. They create unrealistic expectations and standards that are unattainable for most people, and as a result, many of us end up feeling inadequate and unhappy in our bodies.
I’m guilty of contributing to these conversations and perpetuating them. But one of the biggest things I’ve learned in my years of self-discovery and growth is that this narrative needs to change. We need to stop capitalising on people's insecurities and turn the conversation into something more rewarding and worthwhile, that’s really going to leave a mark on this world.
A bit of my background
For as long as I can remember, I’ve not gone a day without hearing commentary on other people's bodies; the shapes, sizes, and differences, from both positive and negative perspectives. I grew up with incredibly supportive parents, who tried to instil that it doesn’t matter what you look like, which for them broadly related to your physicality, what you wore, the need for (or not needing) makeup.
However, upon reflection as an adult, I don’t think they realised that the way they talked about other people's bodies negated the work that they were trying to do. They would never overly criticise others, it was comments about the weather girl, things like ‘she’s a bit beefy’, ‘she’s quite flat chested’, or commenting about someone they’d not seen for a while in that they’d either gained or lost weight - both the positive and negative commentary left a lasting effect on my mind.
My parents’ comments alone weren’t what set me up to have unrealistic ideals about my body in the future; it was the consistent exposure to the standards set by society that left a mark on my psyche.
Side note: I don’t blame my parents for my body image struggles over the years. They’re Boomers; this type of commentary is a generational thing. I know their intentions were good, and the lessons they tried to instil were powerful, but now powerful enough to quieten the noise and pressure from society once I left the nest.
Being the taller-than-most, lanky, freckly, token red-head in primary school (a very small school) didn’t help the situation either. I was never severely bullied, but the ongoing commentary about my body shape, my freckles and my hair colour definitely hurt. I felt singled out like I was different to everyone else, and that being different was a bad thing. I can remember sitting on the bus to school and comparing my knees to the other girls around me, theirs were smooth and round, but my knees were knobby and bony, and I’d try to position my legs so they looked more like the other girls and my body didn’t seem so different.
As I went through my adolescence, the societal conditioning to be thin was pervasive and inescapable. The 90s were peak heroin-chic era, the models and celebs we saw in magazines continued to become thinner and thinner. It wasn’t just the visuals we’d see, as a teen reading magazines that were intended for twenty-somethings and above, I’d read headlines like ‘the best and worst beach bodies’, ‘burn more fat’, ‘lose your belly’, and ‘slim down now’.
As an impressionable teen, this visual representation became a benchmark for ‘pretty’, or ‘beautiful’. What I didn’t realise my brain was processing and wiring at the time, was that these standards began to solidify the basis of my ‘worth’ and what was important in life.
If you’ve known me all my life, you know I’ve always been thin, which is now known as ‘thin privilege’. Biologically, I have an ectomorph body, I grew up as a little athletics kid, dancing, doing BJP Physical Culture, and I lived in the country, so I was always riding bikes and spending time outside, because there wasn’t much else to do in the tiny little town I grew up in. Into my 20’s I still remained thin; however, my weight did begin to fluctuate up and down as I was experiencing different phases of my life.
So with what was part genetics, part active lifestyle, I generally remained thin. But despite this, I still never felt truly happy in my body because I was always comparing myself to others and striving for the unattainable thin ideal I'd see in the media (no visible fat, cellulite, abs, muscle tone, etc) or that would be discussed in conversations around me. Not to mention working backstage with runway models or on swimwear shoots, it was really hard not to look at these models and compare their bodies to mine.
Throughout my twenties, I was always trying to lose that bit of belly fat, the wobbly bits on my arms, enhance how visible my collar bones were, and wanted any ounce of fat on my body to disappear. I’d notice every little ripple or bump of my clothes sitting on my body and think about what I could do to make things fit better and make my body look smaller, smoother, and more like the shapes I'd see in media and backstage with the models I was working with.
I fell victim to hacks and products that promised fat loss success, like laxatives, skinny teas, and working out harder and more often. There were times when I was living on barely any food, drinking my calories, and loved the idea of getting gastro or the flu in the hope it would help me lose weight.
Why? So I could be desired, beautiful, noticed, accepted, and worthy.
I was thin and had always been thin, but I still spent so much time thinking that I wasn’t thin enough, or my body wasn’t the perfect shape.
Everything I used to do for my ‘health’, was really about a result in fat loss, and an improvement in the way I looked, not about improving how I felt physically, mentally or improving my vitality and longevity of life.
Then, I began to have some real health struggles and concerns (it’s a doozy of a run sheet).
When you spend so much of your time feeling unwell, it makes you begin to reevaluate your life and what is meaningful to you. When I started to reassess my values, I realized how unnecessary and harmful this societal pressure to be thin can be. It creates a culture where we are constantly comparing ourselves to others, rather than celebrating our individuality and what lies beneath the surface.
I knew I needed to make a change in how I perceived my body, how I spoke to and thought about my body, and gain a new perspective on what my body meant to me. I no longer wanted it to be something that I let define my worth or would be the thing that would finally help me meet the guy I’d been waiting to meet. I knew there was more to me than my physical appearance, and that’s what I wanted to now focus on growing, nurturing, and evolving.
Looking after my body then became about true health, which for me is about improving my quality of life and longevity, how I feel in my mind and my body and ensuring my sense of self-worth and confidence always remains solid. I now focus on eating, moving, and living in a way that amplifies my energy, brings me joy, and prevents the uncomfortable symptoms that can arise when I’m living out of tune with my biology.
I want to continue to increase my strength and stamina so I can improve my MTB riding skills and carry that into my later years of life (amongst many other uses for a strong body). I want to look after my gut, hormones, and my brain to increase my energy, cognitive function and support my body through pregnancy one day and eventually into menopause. And much, much more.
Of course, this journey has not been easy, and it’s not over - the conversations are still ripe in our society, so days with negative thoughts still pop up. I practice self-compassion, try my hardest to only talk to myself in a way that I would talk to others, and have released the sabotaging inner monologue that used to perpetuate my negative body image. There are times I slip, but I don’t let it ruin my day. I now have an understanding of where these thoughts come from and have tools to use to pull me out of the negativity.
It’s taken time and effort to shift my mindset and overcome the societal pressures that have been ingrained in me since childhood. But I am proud of the progress I have made, and I am excited to continue to grow and learn and share what I’ve learned along the way.
The truth is, our bodies are just one aspect of who we are. They do not define our worth or determine our success in life. By perpetuating harmful societal expectations and beliefs, we are not only harming ourselves but also contributing to a culture of body shaming and discrimination.
All bodies are beautiful. Like all things in nature (and also like pasta), they come in all shapes, sizes, and colours. There’s no one model that you should be subscribing to, because who made those rules anyway (men in ancient Greece and the patriarchy, and their thoughts and beliefs can’t continue to rule our lives).
All I want for myself, my loved ones, my clients, and you is to experience the feel-good effect. When you step out of the small space that’s keeping you tamed to your perceived expectation of others, and into the expansive place that is life on your terms, it feels so bloody good, and I can’t wait for you to experience it.