Words: Didi Marina Salonia (she/her)
It’s a rigged game of Choose Your Own Misogyny, where every path leads to the same ending: no one wins.
Beauty trends don’t love you back. They never did. They’re a treadmill with no off switch, a finish line that vanishes the second you get close. Right now you’re overlining your lips, filling your cheeks, and lifting your brows because the algorithm says so. Yet in the ‘90s, we massacred our eyebrows into extinction because the magazines told us to. We’ve swerved from Victoria Secret abs to Kardashian curves, from heroin chic to BBLs, and back again, chasing bodies which aren’t built, only bought. And the media? They’re pushing lip fillers, fox-eye surgery, and buccal fat removal – procedures people will be laser-removing, dissolving, and regretting in the next 30 years.
The problem isn’t just that beauty expectations change. It’s that they’re designed to. Every trend is a scam with an expiry date, waiting to go off so the next one can take its place. That’s how the industry stays alive: by convincing you that the face you have now isn’t quite right. But maybe, just maybe, if you tweak this, shrink that, lift here, dissolve there, you’ll finally be enough. The finish line keeps moving. The women who have “made it” (celebrities with their perfect lighting, unlimited budgets, and surgical fine-tuning) aren’t even playing the same game. They set the rules from a world we can’t enter, then watch as the rest of us carve ourselves up trying to keep up.
And what happens when the trend shifts? The same surgeons cash in twice: once to sculpt, once to undo. Because beauty trends don’t just sell you perfection. They sell you regret. And regret is a goldmine. We have proof that it’s all pointless. The women that we think look perfect, the ones with sculpted bodies and airbrushed faces, get torn apart in comment sections by people who look like they’re deteriorating in the darkness of their basement, flooded with misery. Too thin. Too fat. Too brown. Too pale. Too slutty. Too prude. Too old. Too fake. Too real. Too much makeup. Not enough makeup.
It’s a rigged game of Choose Your Own Misogyny, where every path leads to the same ending: no one wins. I don’t know about you, but if Selena is too fat, if Dua Lipa’s ass is too small, if pregnant Margot Robbie is ruined, if Halle Berry is too old, if 8-pack-less Charlie Puth is too average, and if Issa Rae is too dark, then I am respectfully taking a hard pass on public opinion. The fact is that being happy on the inside equals glowing on the outside and loving everyone else’s imperfections. Meanwhile, being miserable on the inside equals decaying on the outside and hating on everyone. Have you ever noticed how the happiest people aren’t the ones foaming at the mouth in a comment section about a woman’s cellulite? Exactly.
If you’re going to fix something, let it be something that actually matters. The way you speak to yourself. The way you let people treat you. The way you shrink yourself down in rooms that need to hear your voice. The way you let fear keep you from moving. The way you wait for permission to take up space. Change that. Fight for that. Because you could have the most symmetrical face in the world, the longest lashes, the smallest waist, and it wouldn’t mean a thing if you still hated yourself. Momentary, shallow fixes won’t actually make you like yourself more. If anything, they sink the media’s voice even deeper into your subconscious, leaving more space for their next lie to take root. And once you start paying attention, you’ll see it everywhere: in advertisements, in TV shows, in films, in music, in art, in the way your mate talks about their body, in the way you talk about your own. All of it, tiny reminders that you are not quite enough.
But here’s the truth: you are a fleeting thing. A breath, a moment, a spark of light that will never exist again in this exact form. The world will move on without you one day, no matter how much you tweak and tighten and change. So why waste time trying to be anything other than exactly who you are? Love yourself wildly. Love yourself without conditions. Love yourself the way the world refuses to. Not needing anyone’s approval because it’s worthless. Not listening to the media because they are mining your confidence for profit. Not thinking you have to look a certain way to be loved. That’s not love. Love isn’t something you chase. It’s something you choose. And loving yourself is something you fight for.
