Five-year-old me is still the most confident person I know.
Annual Christmas concerts were her time to shine, even if there were thirty other kids on stage. As one of the tallest in the class, she stood in the back but made sure her jazz hands were the jazziest.
She felt beautiful and loved making herself feel beautiful. She gravitated toward any article of clothing with a pattern, shimmer or frill — Fancy Nancy was her fashion icon. Having a unibrow, being a little chubby and not the same colour as most of the Disney princesses never made her feel less beautiful, just different.
Then came puberty.
Puberty is transformative, and for her — me — it was the first time my definition of beauty changed, and it didn’t include me. I was an early bloomer — the first of my friends to get their period, grow boobs and hair in all the places. Most of the girls I was friends with didn’t even know what actually happens during menstruation.
Does our uterus fall out and then miraculously regrow? Is it just peeing blood?
It was a mystery, but more importantly it was gross, so if you did know what happened during “that time of the month,” you kept it to yourself. Despite this, I told a few of my friends that I had officially blossomed, and they reinforced my deepest concerns. Ew. I remember hiding my pad in the shallow pockets of my Bethany Mota Aéropostale jeggings on the way to my elementary school’s washrooms. It was embarrassing to go through that before the rest of my friends, and no one could convince me it was a beautiful process.
The changes felt so sudden, like being under a microscopic lens. In my pre-teen years, it became a regular occurrence for my “friends” to point out parts of me — upper lip hair, unibrow, leg hair, knuckle hair, arm hair — that I had felt completely neutral about until the girls who subscribed to beauty standards that affirmed their beauty told me otherwise.
While growing up, my idea of beauty could be defined through femininity — Deepika Padukone as Shanti Priya in Om Shanti Om, Selena Gomez in the “Love You Like a Love Song” music video (see her bedazzled corset) and my mom. I have always thought my mom was beautiful, and I still do. I noticed when she changed her lipstick shade or tried a new hairstyle before going to a family function. My mom was also one of the people who made me feel beautiful and wanted to keep that feeling alive, which eventually meant letting me erase my unibrow with wax.
But, on the eve of my grade six beach day, I was feeling extremely anxious. The thought of my bare legs being on display next to my white friend’s legs was not a comforting scenario. I called my mom at work and begged for a waxing appointment, but she said no — which only spun me out even more. Having exposed, hairy legs was not an option, so I stole a razor from my older sister and slathered very-berry-beautiful shaving cream on my legs. My iPod 4 played an instructional YouTube video on shaving, and I got to work. In a shocking turn of events, I shaved my legs to just above my knees and had no cuts, but because they never show the backside of legs getting shaved in the Venus commercials, I left them as is.
I knew shaving my legs without my mom’s permission was not okay. I was overwhelmed — excited to see my legs hairless for the first time, but I also knew my mom would be disappointed. I felt so much guilt for disobeying her, for letting myself get affected by what my friends would think of me, and for disappointing my mom. My mom had always put in the effort in affirming my beauty — making me aware of women like Frida Khalo and Kajol who embraced their facial hair and were still widely considered beautiful. She would point out Aveeno commercials where a faint trace of stomach hair is shown, and instilled in my siblings and I that we’re enough.
The feelings took over, and I knew my mom would be home from work soon. The thought of looking her in her eyes, telling her that the years of teaching me about true beauty went down the drain with the very-berry shaving cream, was impossible. I decided to write her a note. I wanted her to understand the necessity behind my choice and to agree that there was absolutely no way I could go to beach day with my natural legs, and I felt sorry for going against her wishes, but I needed to do it. I let my teardrops dribble on the paper, and even circled and labelled them so she would know that I really was sorry.
My mom was a little surprised that I had shaved. My older sister was told to remove her hair by others, while I was convinced by myself. The joke was on me — the next day, I laid beside all my friends at the beach only to realize most of them had leg hair and absolutely no one had the splotchy shave job I did.
High school presented a new wave of beauty. I slowly started to wear makeup, the signature look, consisting of concealer, blush, highlighter and mascara. I loved the process of getting ready, making sure my eyelashes didn’t clump together and that I had just enough blush on my nose. This quickly became a habit, and the seemingly simple process of getting ready for the day became something I had to do every day. I wanted to feel pretty and to be like my friends, and soon enough our makeup routine was practically a uniform — at one point we all had the same mascara.
The desire to be noticed burned inside me, so I composed what I thought was the most beautiful version of myself. The girl who could run student council, but was also on good terms with everyone; the girl who excelled in theatre, but also knew when to give everyone else the spotlight; the girl you could go to for homework answers, but could invite to your house party. In the end, none of this equates to beauty.
My high school journal entries are riddled with negative comparisons to my much smaller friends and self-inflicted insecurities about my body when friends wore skipping breakfasts like a badge of honour. I had to learn that even when I was at my thinnest, “prettiest,” most popular self, I didn’t feel beautiful. My friends weren’t perfect either. Being the beauty standard does not mean they believed it, and it doesn’t feel beautiful to have to change yourself just to adhere to a standard. Looking a certain way, wearing the right kind of mascara and being around certain people can’t do anything on an internal level, because beauty is not something that can be bought or sold.
Now, my perception of beauty is more complicated than ever: I resist the Eurocentric CoverGirl ads, all the while conforming to them. I will pluck my eyebrows weekly ensuring that no trace of a unibrow is there. I still feel the pressure to wear makeup if I know I need to make a good or lasting impression on someone, and almost always shave my legs before wearing shorts to keep up an illusion. I have come to an understanding that beauty is what I make it to be — I can be beautiful when I listen to Beyoncé, I can be beautiful coming out of an exam shedding my stresses and gaining a sense of pride, I can be beautiful when the world tells me I am not.
And looking back to the young girl who secretly shaved her legs, I see a girl who just didn’t know how to exist in a body that seemingly developed overnight. I see a girl who thinks she is anything but beautiful. I see a girl who was wrong.
This article is a part of The Ubyssey's 2023 creative non-fiction supplement, beauty.