Learning to Love the Parts You Hate

Learning to love the parts you hate is NOT an easy thing to do – how many of us can honestly say that we’re 100% happy with every part of our appearance?

As so often happens when it comes to dishing out compliments, we see only the best in other people’s appearances (we rarely notice the imperfections) but turn the tables and all we see are the bits of our own that we’re not happy with. We don’t give those good bits enough of the credit they deserve, and we’re all too quick to knock the bits we see as imperfect. Or rather, that SOCIETY deems as imperfect.

Two things caught my attention this week: Firstly, unless you’ve been living under a rock you won’t have failed to notice that Thursday was International Women’s Day (SO many posts on social media with fantastic anecdotes and short stories have appeared this week), and then there was the #sideprofileselfie hashtag.

The #sideprofileselfie – the big nose taboo

If you haven’t see the #sideprofileselfie hashtag then it’s basically exactly as it sounds; people (mostly women) sharing pictures of their side profile. It was started by journalist Radhika Sanghani who’d grown up always hating her nose and avoiding photos of her face in profile.

Now this TOTALLY resonated with me because I, too, grew up hating my nose and hated side profile photos even more. That was, until I started my blog. Somehow posting pictures of myself online not only gave me the confidence to embrace what I’d always hated, but to learn to love it. When you look at photos of yourself as much as a fashion/beauty/lifestyle blogger does then you very quickly get used to seeing yourself from all angles, good and bad. And eventually you become desensitised to that honking great feature in the middle of your face when you’re looking at it all day every day*.

(*That does make me sound somewhat narcissistic – I’m not really sitting at my computer doing nothing but looking at pictures of myself all day. I do have other work to do. Oh WAIT, must take a selfie first…)

Big noses are only big because society deems them as big, and therefore imperfect, and how you view your “big” nose is entirely up to you and NO ONE else.

Radhika started her #sideprofileselfie campaign by sharing a picture of her “big” nose (big being a purely subjective term here) and encouraging others to do the same. What it seems to have done is to make many women, younger girls especially, see that big noses are only big because society deems them as big, and therefore imperfect, and how you view your “big” nose is entirely up to you and NO ONE else. Some young girls have even said that her campaign has made them think again about the nose job they’d been planning for years (since the first time they were teased about it?), so a big high five to Radhika.

(I’ll stop putting “big” in speech marks now, hopefully you’ll get that I continue to mean big in a way that suggests a nose is big only to in the mind of its owner.)

As someone who grew up knowing that her nose wasn’t a cute button nose, and that her profile was something she wasn’t proud of, and that the ONE kid who called her Barry Manilow one day when she was about 11 was the one that made her self-conscious about it for the first time – I know where she and all these other women are coming from when it comes to having a big nose.

We place too much importance on what society deems to be beautiful and far too little what our nearest and dearest love about us – perfect, imperfect or otherwise.

But this is the thing with our self-perceived imperfections: they’re not imperfections to everyone else. Remember 99% of people really don’t care about you and your everyday woes (in the nicest way of course) – they’ve got woes of their own to contend with. So are they bothered that we have big noses? Of course not. They’re not bothered in the same way that we’re not bothered that they have small boobs or a big bum or short legs or any NUMBER of things that society tells us aren’t beautiful. We place too much importance on what society deems to be beautiful and far too little what our nearest and dearest love about us – perfect, imperfect or otherwise.

I wrote about my love/hate relationship with my nose several years ago and even showed an imaginary “before and after” nose job to demonstrate what I’d always longed for. I’ve long since come to terms with having a nose that isn’t small and cute. I don’t have a dainty profile. I have a STRONG profile. And the very fact that it’s strong is kinda perfect considering that this is the Year of the Woman, and women everywhere are proving themselves to be strong in all sorts of ways.

So I’ll get my #sideprofileselfie on social media as soon as I can – I’ve not done it yet because I’ve had a busy week working hard and being my own #GirlBoss. But that’s a story for another time… 😉 !

HAVE YOU LEARNED TO LOVE A PART OF YOURSELF THAT YOU’VE ALWAYS HATED? TELL ME IN THE COMMENTS!

LIKE THIS POST? YOU MIGHT ALSO WANT TO READ…

– Dressing Without the Fear of “What Will Others Think…?”
– How to Make the Most of Your Best Feature (and How to Get One if You Think You Don’t)