The media: you’re guilty. You posit campaigns like #likeagirl – and then feed audiences images that destroy their sense of self worth. Red circles drawn around cellulite: the lifeblood of Heat magazine for years.

Before and After Culture is toxic to self worth

Or worse – you print page after page of the dreaded before-and-after photo. We’re starting to see it creep into Instagram and other social media platforms. You say motivational, I say delusional: when you compress a random person’s timeline of a lifestyle change into two moments, you’re pushing your audience for an emotional reaction based on how they feel about themselves, not a rational one based on who they are.

So this post is AKA re-working a Buzzfeed post into something positive which doesn’t clickbait based on conditioned insecurities.

Dear women everywhere, 

You already know this. The gloss is not your boss, but we keep letting it be because retouching is something that’s become our reality.

We keep allowing these conflicted messages to tell us our butts are too big AND too small. Our eyebrows are too unruly AND too weak. Our skin is too matte and too shiny.

There are no Before and After Pics

We are not ugly. There is no ‘Before’ and ‘After’; the dichotomy is made up of adverbs: not nouns. They are not states of being. Not goals or potentials or dreams. Leave out the capital letters – we have a before and an after and two huge pins placed angrily onto something that moves. Onto a human being in flux, in time, and in environments it usually can’t control.

They are not what you think they are and they know it.

Cameras lie, all the time. The pictures – even more.

Real beauty is honest: to the point of being unabashedly flawed. 

We can be pro the pre-makeover.

We can have wrinkles. Fat. Spots. Freckles. Dark shadows. Sun spots. Laughter lines. Furrows. Pores.

PORES ARE FUNCTIONAL PARTS OF YOUR SKIN.

You’re supposed to wake up in the morning and just be. For those first fifteen minutes of your day, you’re meant to *just*. *Be*.

Your body and your face and your mind can’t keep waiting for you to love them. Life’s too short. Before and After is a false dichotomy that you do not need to feed into.