The Girls by Katie Smith, Illustrator

The standard of beauty has mostly been oppressive all over the world – from skin bleaching in India and most African countries, to double eyelid surgery in South Korea, to corsets in Europe, and waist trainers on Instagram, many cultures enforce appearance ideals that demand transformation. The message is clear: you are a canvas to be done, unfinished. And it sells you a solution on how to look better, which makes you believe that you are not enough as you are.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it starts young. my Achilles heel was adolescence, and I remember it vividly, begging to straighten my hair every week, wanting to fit in, not wearing pink because it’s too girly, attempting a ponytail cause all the girls are doing it, and obsessing over bags, shoes, or lip gloss. These are not so bad per se, but like I said, it incentivizes appearance-based validation and grows with us to want more. Hence, capitalism.

Even though Capitalism is not the only villain, it largely profits from insecurity, especially in beauty. It engineers our desires; our maximalism- the pressure to look good, and our reluctance to repeat outfits. It’s not just personal taste but monetized self-image.

‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,’ they say. But our first beholder is the mirror. And if we don’t like what we see, well, we look for other places to make us complete. Often, the internet. It never stops offering solutions: one more product, one more hack promising to erase your flaws.

It is true that dress code matters, and you gotta match the aesthetics of your environment. But when did it become normal to feel out of place everywhere except home? Even a quick grocery run can feel like a full production sometimes. When did getting dressed become a performance, not a choice?  Every day became a fashion statement, a calculation, a regret of repeating clothes. we are playing by rules we did not create, so dressing down feels like a rebellion.

That is why it is necessary to allow ourselves to look ‘uncurated’: Groomed, ungroomed; shouldn’t true freedom mean opting into either without judgement. The freedom to choose without guilt?

This does not mean that enjoying beauty is always a symptom of insecurity. But, it does mean we need to ask: Who taught us what counts as beautiful?… When do you feel ‘free’ in your appearance? The goal isn’t to reject ‘beauty,’ but to redefine it- to stop equating effort with value, or appearance with worth. The freedom to look ‘un-curated’ is the freedom to be uncalculated. To dress up and down because we want to, not because we owe the world a curated version of ourselves. Let’s normalize looking undone. Let’s reclaim the kind of beauty that doesn’t require constant effort. After all, freedom isn’t just about what we can do, it’s about what we can let go of, too.

Written by: Ruth Mekasha

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