My mum has never mentioned ageing to me. She’s never bemoaned her age, the emergence of grey hairs, skin or body changes. She doesn’t care about anti-ageing creams or treatments. None of my relatives have either, even those closer to my age. Ageing woes just don’t exist for them, and yet, for me, it’s been an unwelcome foe since my late teens, waiting for its opportunity to strike. The reason for this disparity, I think, could be a cultural issue. Because the only difference between my mum, my relatives, and me is that they grew up in India and I grew up in the UK. Anita Bhagwandas is really ugly .” This was an anonymous comment left on an online feature 10 years ago, when I was pictured alongside my more conventionally attractive, white colleagues. “Trolls will be trolls,” friends consoled when I told them of the incident.

Having been taken with Ugly, an unflinching critique of ‘beauty’ and how we perceive it throughout history, Elizabeth Morris learned more from its author Anita Bhagwandas – a south Wales writer striking out with this debut book after several years highlighting how the beauty industry underserves women of colour. Being a child, I didn’t have the words to identify the feeling but, decades later, I can still feel its searing intensity. I now recognise it as shame; it was the first moment that I felt “different” from those around me, in a way that I could identify as negative. A seed of anguish was planted. From that moment on, every time a classmate said my frizzy hair was horrible or my arms were hairy, or I was told by a playmate that her mum said she couldn’t play with me any more because I was brown, my feeling of otherness grew. As did my sense of ugliness.The author’s pre-set experience has added value to the writing process: ‘I’ve worked on the inside of the industry, I’ve got a very unique insight into how so many parts of it work. The personal experiences I explore in the book bring together the elements of politics, history, science and psychology of beauty standards,’ she explains. I would scour teen magazines for any information I could use to make myself feel better, feel prettier. It was a very narrow beauty remit – thin and white, basically,’ she says. Much of my work is as a speaker and I have curated, moderated and appeared on panels at Women Of The World and Stylist Live plus numerous literary festivals. I also regularly host beauty events with global brands like Sunday Riley, YSL and The Body Shop. I would've appreciated some more advice on how to get out of this trap of "ugly." It's clear that we need to aim for confidence and influence people around us through meaningful conversations, and we should support beauty brands who offer a wider range of products for all skin colors. But how exactly can we aim to thrive better without the pressure of beautiful and skinny? This was not new information to me; I’d always felt resoundingly unattractive when it came to my appearance. And now, here was the proof for everyone to see. Had the troll criticised my writing, called me “weird-looking”, even the customary “fat bitch” or one of the similar insults I’d received before, perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite so rattled, but here was an online confirmation from a stranger of how I really felt about myself. This was indisputable truth: I was ugly.

As 33yo woman who noticed significant changes in my body I started being way meaner and cruel to myself than ever before. I hated what I saw in the mirror everyday. I was horrified I didn't fit in my clothes anymore and blamed myself for not looking like I am 25 anymore. So if you're feeling like crap about yourself or are extremely judgemental about other bodies grab this book and help yourself understand why is that so. I developed some self-preservation tactics in an effort to counteract the wrongness of the beauty standards I’d been sold my entire life. Now, I employ slow beauty, using products until they’re finished and buying them because I love the smells, design and textures, so it’s more of a pleasurable, sensory experience rather than panic-buying something I’ve been sold as a “jar of hope.” It makes a big difference to your mindset when you switch to using beauty products for joy, rather than using them to look prettier, thinner, younger. One of my favourite games as a child growing up in Wales was directing doll photo shoots, an odd premonition into my future career directing beauty editorials for magazines. The star of my glamorous imaginary shoots was Barbie, naturally. Although the comment was swiftly removed and dismissed as nonsense by colleagues and friends, it hurt – a lot. In fact, ‘it was lacerating,’ she says.I know I’d like to find another way to approach ageing that’s akin to my mum’s perspective; one that means a birthday milestone feels like a gain and not a loss (for my self-worth or my collagen levels). I want to age with hope, freedom and joy for what’s to come, and to free up that part of my brain that was reserved for ‘anti-ageing’ to celebrate myself, my evolving appearance and the privilege of living. White beauty standards are afforded their power in part because whiteness and proximity to whiteness has been the unquestioned norm for so long that their privileges are almost invisible to those who are elevated. I’m also beauty columnist for The Guardian Saturday magazine, freelance Beauty Director at Condé Nast Traveller, and contribute to several international publications. We're still told that it's good to be thin rather than bigger... even though we have body positivity," Bhagwandas shares. Bhagwandas is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and brand consultant based in London, and the beauty columnist for the Guardian's Saturday magazine. Join her for a conversation with Sali Hughes, the Guardian’s resident beauty columnist and the author of Everything is Washable.

She describes a formative experience growing up in south Wales, when she was told she was ‘too big’ to wear one of the fairy-tale dresses being handed out at her first princess party. Having already noticed the book’s undeniable impact on my own everyday life, and with a new understanding of Anita Bhagwandas’ intentions being exactly this, I can’t help but feel Ugly has potential to be a powerful tool in dismantling this repetitious and outdated notion of unattainable beauty.

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In her enlightening new book, Ugly, beauty journalist Anita Bhagwandas says these daily rituals to ‘fix’ ourselves, usually to fulfil what society has deemed pretty or beautiful, can be self-flagellating. Perhaps the biggest shift was learning why I’d reduced my self-worth to being entirely defined by how I look, and that made me realise how imperative it was to root my self-esteem elsewhere, in the qualities that really define me – my character and positive traits. Because ugly is an ever-changing, politically charged construct – and the biggest lesson I’ve learned is never to trust those binary categories, “pretty” and “ugly”, don’t actually exist. * * * How to resist the ‘jar of hope’ impulse buy