I am a mother of three daughters, the youngest looks exactly like me. Her birth was what she needed to rethink the relationship with myself and what I found beautiful. As the founder of a beauty brand, I believe that no amount of makeup can cover up a lack of self-love. Loading Something is loading.
As an Iranian-American growing up in the 1990s, my relationship with Eurocentric beauty standards was complex. I saw beauty through the lens of what I saw in the media and my classmates who filled the halls; tall, thin, blond, porcelain blue eyes, hairless skin. There was a way of being and, as a dark hairy Persian girl with only one eyebrow, that presented me with a big obstacle.
The message was clear: to be considered beautiful, feminine, and desirable, I needed to erase my ethnic traits.
This message was reinforced by how often I was bullied because of my appearance. In a world before diversity and inclusion was a hot topic, my sense of identity was formed. I saw myself as less than. I didn’t feel safe or accepted. I felt a lack of belonging, which confused me. Was he American, Persian, both, or neither?
I reinvented myself
We moved in 8th grade and I saw it as an opportunity to reinvent myself. As my grandmother ceremoniously plucked my unibrow and when I saw my forehead part, I gasped, ‘I’m human.’ I spent the next 24 years keeping my “secret” under lock and key. Lasers, tweezers, and treatments helped hide my ethnicity. I married young and promptly gave birth to two beautiful blonde, blue-eyed daughters. My alibi was under lock and key.
The universe had a different plan.
A few years later, I gave birth to my youngest daughter, a replica of me. Her birth was the mirror I needed to reevaluate my grooming habits and the binary thinking of having to look one way to be “beautiful.”
How could my daughters have a chance in this world if their own mother didn’t accept who she was? It was time to rebuild, rewrite, and recapture my beauty narrative.
My unibrow grew back and my attitude completely changed. The shame stories that controlled me were gone. I found freedom in finding myself and peace in loving myself. For my daughters, I have been healing my childhood wounds and telling my story to help change the world into a more inclusive space.
What I want my daughters to always remember
A few years later, I launched TooD Beauty, a line of cosmetics that provides tools for the art of being you. It was time for the beauty industry to have an overhaul. Non-toxic thinking is just as important as non-toxic formulas. Here are four lessons I hope to teach my daughters and reinforce with TooD:
The first, and possibly the most important, is to give your consent. Allow your mind to change and encourage that change. Let your underarm hair grow knowing you won’t be embarrassed about waxing afterwards.
I also want them to invest a lot in knowing themselves. Learn about them in all their incredible rarity and beauty. We are all creators and no one can be a greater inspiration to yourself than you.
Don’t be afraid to embrace the evolution of your body. Every day I remember that the only constant in life is change. This could not be more the case for women than when we think about our bodies. Embrace the changes your body naturally undergoes.
And lastly, when you wear makeup, use it as art. Makeup is true individual expression; an art form to be explored. Whether it’s adding a hint of glitter to my eyebrow or a graphic liner on my neck, there isn’t an inch of my body that can’t be used as a canvas.
Source: www.insider.com