Thando Hopa redefines beauty standards in a heartfelt letter to her young self

Attorney, model and, activist Thando Hopa explores the beauty landscape by writing a heartfelt letter to her teenage self calling for an inclusive industry that embraces the beauty in our differences.

Oo Mamngwevu

beauty

Zozibini Tunzi redefines beauty standards in a heartfelt letter

You’re sitting at a beauty salon at the age of 16 with butterflies in your tummy. You’ve decided your eyebrows are unusually pale and, therefore, unattractive. You’ve decided to dye your milky brows and lashes a dark brown hue to give your face a sense of conventionality. At this age, you’re well versed in beauty standards and I think it’s time we explore the journey we’ve experienced through concepts of beauty. Do you remember the bedtime story your grandmother told you at the age of three? It was the folklore of a young woman called Seilatsatsi, “the one who avoids the sun”.

Seilatsatsi was blessed with an enchantingly rare beauty, but she could never step into the sunlight, or she would turn into a termite hill. Her curse was not that the sunlight would make her ugly, but rather that she would lose her form and, ultimately, her life. In some ways, the story carried within it a societal concern: beauty that was too inaccessible came with a cost that burdened and controlled its holder. At this time, you were experiencing the beauty standard as an idea, a mere mythology about a woman whose beauty you had no reference to. Therefore, her image description didn’t compare or compete with anyone yet. When you reached puberty, you found yourself reading the instructions on a hair removal cream package. Some people had commented that you’re way too hairy for a girl. You didn’t know that girls weren’t supposed to be hairy, but it didn’t take long for the once ignored comments to invade your self-image. Suddenly, body hair you’d hardly noticed became a source of shame, and it was insinuated that you were unkempt. Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with women having hair on their legs, armpits, or anywhere else. However, your reality was influenced by a thought experiment with a men’s shaving brand in America in the early 1900s. In an effort to capture a female market, a series of advertisements was curated and published in women’s magazines to propagandise the idea that body hair on a woman is highly objectionable.

You’re now 16, no longer a child who’s experiencing beauty as an idea. You’re a young lady experiencing it as a construct that is anchored in commodification, currency and the economy. The construct of beauty is never satisfied with your present self; it is always trying to project the marketed image of an idealised woman onto the body of the real-life self.

The body is always monitored for fear of being in decline. Are you gaining weight? Are you looking older? Are you losing hair? Did you shave your legs? Are you getting pimples? Are your eyebrows too pale, too thin, or too thick? The beauty construct requires you to constantly manage an array of expectations that squeeze into your body until there’s hardly much of you left.

You’re probably wondering whether this ever stops. It doesn’t. But it does slow down. As you grow older, you get better at calling your spirit back from this construct. At the age of 35, a lot of life has happened. More often than not, you stop eyeing and interrogating the body, and you start seeing the substance of the woman who embodies it. You have deep moments of the ceremonious proof of life that tones, stretches, textures, and marks the features of your physical being. The ancient Greeks called beauty hōraios, which means being “of the hour”. They believed that beauty is present in all phases, ages, and forms of life, both in the body and in the mind. Hōraios nourishes the life force that embodies the present self. This is the act of being enough – commemorating who you are, as you are, and how far you’ve come.

Before you walk into the skilled hands of the beautician and walk out with a slightly new appearance, know that you are beautiful in every hour. The idea and the construct of beauty may disembody you and deny you the celebration of your present self, but with time, you’ll learn how to remind yourself that you are enough and, in those moments, you will call your spirit back.

Love Thando

Beauty