It feels like we can’t catch a break. From the minute we’re old enough to start reading magazines and engage with the media and pop culture, we’re bombarded with unrealistic beauty standards that we’re meant to aspire to. When I came of age, we were still obsessed with the Eurocentric ideal of being lithe, blonde and blue-eyed. As someone who was always naturally curvy, I remember looking through magazines and wondering why I didn’t look like these women.

It took me years of therapy and a lot of hard work to get over the hangups I had about my body. And now that I look back on the journey I’ve been on over the years it makes me incredibly sad to think that we’re taught to hate ourselves. Instead of being in absolute wonder of our bodies and all of the incredible things they do to keep us alive, we’re told to shoehorn ourselves into airbrushed caricatures.

We’re not allowed to look human – that is, we’re not allowed to have pores and discolouration and body hair and fine lines and all of the other completely normal things that are part of a human body. The beauty industry wants to smudge us into not existing at all.

There’s a whole feminist take on this that I’m not going to get into, but the gist is the more we busy ourselves trying to fix our fine lines and whatever other nonsense we’re told to fixate on at any given moment, the less time we have to, you know, smash the patriarchy.

And, most importantly, we’re not allowed to age. We’re meant to continue to look like we’re 20 even when we’re 40. I understand now why women become obsessed with making sure they stay youthful. We’re basically told that once we cross the 40s mark, we’re over the hill, we’re finished, we’re irrelevant. So women desperately inject poison into their faces to freeze their expressions in the hope they can pause time.

The stance I’ve always taken with cosmetic procedures is: once you start, where does it stop? Will we ever be completely happy with the way we look? Probably not. So how do you know where to draw a line and learn to be okay with your body?

Are there things I have hangups about? Sure, who doesn’t? But I’m also hyper-aware that beauty is an ever-shifting list of ideals that are now set to us by a multi-billion dollar beauty industry. So who knows how I’d feel about certain things had Eurocentric beauty ideals not dictated certain standards to us to live by. Perhaps I wouldn’t even notice my crow’s feet, for example. And as a side note, who comes up with these names?!

My point is that we’re taught to hate ourselves in order to get us to buy their crap. And anti-ageing products are no different. If you brainwash women enough into believing that to be old is to be irrelevant, of course they’re going to flock to buy your products. And that makes me angry.

Believe it or not, in many Asian cultures ageing is seen more positively. Older people are respected for the life wisdom they can impart. Isn’t that the view we should be taking? Every day alive is a gift, after all.

So no, I’m not going to inject poison into my face. I’m going to make an effort to be grateful for the fact I’m ageing, and that I’ve been gifted with another day of life on this planet. I see it as an act of resistance.

My fine lines and wrinkles tell the story of my life. I refuse to let the beauty industry take them away from me.

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