The blister of beauty

The price we pay to look this 'good'

Walking to work the other day, I developed a blister. It has been a few years since I’ve actually had a blister. Mainly because the only shoes I wear are a rotation of trainers, my Docs, and a pair of Birkenstocks. I prioritise ease and comfort when it comes to shoes.

Which means I wear my knee-high boots less than I want because sometimes my foot slips around inside of them, and it irritates me. It drives me literally insane. Why would I want to be going around my day-to-day life in pain so that I can feel that I’ve fit a certain aesthetic? What I really need to do is by those boots some in-soles.

Anyway, back to my blister. It developed in less than ten minutes. That is how long the walk from my flat to the station is, and by the time I was on the train, I was pulling my Birkenstocks out of my backpack and swapping them on.

This is the second outing these shoes have ever had, and it is also the second time they’ve given me blisters. The last time I tried to wear them out of the house was nearly five years ago on my first day in my corporate London job. Again, I should probably look into in-soles — something to go into the heel of the shoes and stop it rubbing my skin off.

The two blisters now at home on the back of my feet might not have struck such a chord if I hadn’t looked in the mirror that morning after finishing my makeup and been surprised by the depth of the lines on my forehead. Breaking news: twenty-six-year-old has lines on her forehead. Please don’t tell the anti-ageing police, otherwise they might descend and call me old. Of course, by which they mean ugly.

Now, what do two blisters and the first sign of wrinkles have in common? Not much other than they got me thinking about beauty culture. And how we suffer for it.

Let’s break this down into three parts.

What we endure for beauty

I count myself relatively lucky in that (on the whole) I have managed to move beyond seeing beauty as something that must be suffered for. This is both in my approach to myself and art. I no longer feel the need for my body to endure so that it can be consumed most pleasantly by others.

The most obvious example of this always feels like it is food. Diet culture is exhausting. And it is inescapable.

My home is a safe place. The cupboards are stocked with ingredients and cookbooks of all sorts are welcome. My latest addition being a baking book. There is normally always one sort of sweet treat in the fridge, and the butter pot is never empty. We do not cook with sprays that display their lack of calories louder than their ingredients. And I don’t feel the need to swap out ‘fatty’ foods for worse tasting ones. All of this allows me to love cooking and food. My body is (nearly) always excited to be nourished because I do not allow myself to resent it for needing it.

That said, this is a journey. And it wasn’t an easy one. I have worked to be okay with all of the above.

So many of us have disordered eating. How can we not?

“I know how many calories are in all of those” I heard someone say the other day. They were pointing at a pile of salad ingredients. Aubergine. Avocado. Tomatoes. Cucumber.

“I can’t have dinner tonight because I ate XYZ earlier.”

When we reduce our nutritional needs down into calories, we are automatically working with only half the information we need. And it isn’t the good half. Again, I’ve been there. I thought if I substituted meals for calorie counting, then that was fine because calories were what mattered in the war of being slim. Or if I did overindulge, then I could punish myself and sweat it all back out.

We leave ourselves tired because we are underfed. We tell ourselves that the constant rumble of hunger is how it is supposed to feel. All so that we can be slimmer. So that we can seem beautiful in the way we’ve been told is best.

Why do we suffer?

We suffer because we have told ourselves that beauty is a currency. And it is one that is only increasing in value in our online world. Beautiful people are the ones we see as successful. They are rewarded for their beauty by the universe. And they are morally pure too. “This is how you look when you’re unproblematic” we exclaim about beautiful people. As if the world really is just the Catholic’s stage. And ugliness is a punishment for pre-ordained sin.

How do we move past it?

I don’t know. How do we move past something that seems like it is imbedded in our social views? It felt at one point like we might be starting to get somewhere with body-positivity and moving towards a ‘body-neutral’ phase, and now we are right back where we started. And maybe we’re getting worse. There’s a rise in men using anti-ageing skin care — or just skin care in general. Which I see as a net loss. Women have suffered and now men can suffer too.

I am very fortunate to on the whole be surrounded by people who question the standards that are laid down as moral truths. It is easiest to question when you do not feel alone. Leaving social media has helped me. Though, these views trickle from social media and into every day life — it may be less frequent, but it is still there. It is unescapable.

All I can hope is some of my thoughts and words might make someone else feel less alone in their questioning, or offer assurance that the lines in your stomach and face do not make you less than. And there is so much more to life than how we are perceived. Don’t wear the shoes that give you blisters. The potential that someone might compliment your outfit will never be worth it.