This morning I would like to talk about the phenomenon of feeling cute vs. not feeling cute, and I would like to give you the heads-up that this post will be simply LITTERED with unhelpful/unhealthy attitudes about appearance and so forth, in case this is not a day where you feel up to that. I thought about not even posting it at all, but I kept thinking about it, and also sometimes it is good to discuss the unenlightened ways we may feel about things despite all the careful striving towards having a different/better attitude.
Recently, after a rather long stretch of feeling Quite Cute, I have suddenly started feeling Not Very Cute. I don’t THINK it’s that I have ACTUALLY taken an abrupt downturn into lower levels of cuteness, though who knows. But it doesn’t SEEM like one of those moments where one realizes that one suddenly looks a new stage of Older ( <– unhealthful/unenlightened, as if young is always better, when frankly when I look at my peers I think almost all of us look BETTER now than we did two or three decades ago) (NOT THAT APPEARANCE SHOULD MATTER): I think I look pretty much the same as when I felt Quite Cute, but that it’s not hitting my eyeballs in the same way.
Here are some of the things bothering me:
• My jeans are either too big or too small, or maybe they’re BOTH because they’re not the right fit for me, or maybe my eyes have finally stopped seeing bootcut as fashionable, but in any case they are making me feel frumpy. And I firmly believe that if the clothes don’t work on the body, the problem is with the clothes and not with the body—but WHY can’t I find an inseam that isn’t either HIGHWATER or STEPPING ON IT??? I’M STARTING TO THINK MY BODY IS THE PROBLEM
• I cut my hair too short by accident (I was aiming for collarbone-length but made a mistake of overconfidence, and now it’s mid-neck-length), and it feels Practical and Older Woman ( <– again, poor attitude about aging), and also my hair is one of my Good Features and now I have less of it. And instead of going into a long, luxurious ponytail (which had gotten TOO long), it barely fits into a stubby one, with a fringe of hair along the back of my neck, like neck bangs, and then pieces escape the ponytail and tickle my face and I HATE that. For work I’ve been putting the top part back in a barrette, but I don’t feel cute with it that way. I mean, I don’t hate it; it’s fine. But I catch sight of myself in a mirror and I think it looks kind of dowdy.
• Also, my hair continues to darken: I was blonde as a child, dark blonde as a teenager, and then it’s just been getting more and more brown ever since. And I LIKE brown hair! Brown hair is NICE! But my feeling about What I Look Like got locked in while I still had dark blonde hair, so my current mid-brown feels wrong ON ME. Combined with the shortness, it feels like I used to have Good Hair and now I don’t. I know it will grow. And I could get highlights. But right now it feels like I have Sad Hair.
• Is my hair maybe THINNING?? I have been assuming I’d inherited the stays-thick-and-hardly-gets-any-greys hair of my mother and my maternal grandmother—but maybe in fact I have inherited the goes-fully-grey-then-fully-white-then-thins-to-full-scalp-visibility hair of my paternal grandmother!! After all, I have inherited her narrow shoulders and rounded neck/shoulder area, unlike my mother who has straight non-narrow shoulders and no rounding!! TIME TO PANIC, and also to spend a small part of each day futilely and unhelpfully peering at the scalp in the mirror and trying to predict its plans.
• My new glasses. I am still getting used to them. Sometimes I think they’re GREAT. Other times I think I should go back to my old frames. Combined with the hair cut, I feel like they’re less good. Or else they’re great! I can’t tell. They are making me feel uncertain; and also, their newness means I notice myself more often in the mirror.
• My upper arms. Sigh. They sometimes make SOFT FLAPPING SOUNDS as I go down stairs. I knew this would happen! Flappy upper arms come for almost all of us! (And losing weight certainly made the situation worse.) But it’s still disheartening, along with the decrease in the quality of the skin of my neck. I am trying to be philosophical about it. I am TRYING. I don’t notice OTHER women’s upper arms / neck skin as a bad thing! It looks entirely age-appropriate, if I notice it at all, which I generally don’t!
• I bought a bunch of cute t-shirts as per last year’s New Year’s resolution, but the sizing/shrinkage of the brand I like is inconsistent, so sometimes the XL ones are perfect and sometimes they are too snug and I have to keep tugging at them and I feel like they make me look lumpy; and if I size up, sometimes the 2XL ones are perfect and sometimes they are too big and and I think they look baggy and sloppy. It is frustrating.
• And actually ALL my clothes seem wrong in every way. These are the same clothes I was wearing before, when I thought I looked super cute, so why do I now feel like I look frumpy/silly/wrong? Maybe I was falsely perceiving them BEFORE, when I thought they were cute!! Or maybe I have aged out of fun Converse sneakers and graphic t-shirts?? ( <– terrible/ageist) How is it that polo shirts, which before seemed like just the right level of dressing up for a very physical job where jeans and sneakers are necessities, now feel frumpy?
• Okay, a veer into weight issues. One reason I suspect my perceptions are flawed is that those perceptions can be affected by what I THINK I weigh, even when I am WRONG. So for example, I thought my weight was at the high end of the 10-pound range it goes naturally up and down within, and I thought that would explain why my jeans felt wrong and my shirts felt tight. Even though normally my clothes seem to fit fine no matter where I am in the range—but what I’m saying is that I thought it would explain why I might FEEL like they didn’t fit right. And then I found out actually I am at the lower end of that range, not the higher end. So something is clearly wrong with my perception. AND ALSO WEIGHT IS A TERRIBLE WAY TO MEASURE CUTENESS. SIMPLY TERRIBLE. WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS. LET’S NOT DO IT. GAH WHY
(I would like to add for the sake of balance that one reason I stopped losing weight is that I felt I looked right/cute HERE, at THIS weight, even though HERE is certainly not what our culture considers thin, and in fact it would be a Nightmare Weight for many, many women. Which makes me feel bad to think about, so I try not to.)
I will tell another anecdote that involves unenlightened perception. I donated blood the other day, and the guy who did the screening (took my blood pressure, did the finger-stick, asked the questions, etc.) was My Type: a big fellow about my age, with a beard. He complimented my driver’s license photo, which IS a good one. Then, he was kind of humming along to the radio as he held my hand to do the finger-stick, and I’d noticed the radio station was a good one as I was waiting (NEARLY AN HOUR PAST MY APPOINTMENT TIME, RED CROSS NEEDS TO GET THEIR ACT TOGETHER), and I said so, and he said he’d chosen it, and I said nice work, and ANYWAY the interaction wasn’t, like, overtly flirty, but I did feel he was APPRECIATIVE of my appearance. And of course of my taste in music. And certainly none of us would want to get our validation from men, or view ourselves only through The Male Gaze, or count their opinions about our attractiveness as having more value than our own opinions or than our friends’ opinions; and certainly none of us would want to tie ANY part of our value to our physical attractiveness TO BEGIN WITH!! But I am just saying, I felt cuter after that exchange. Then felt kind of stupid about it. (But still cuter.)
I find my self-perception of Cute vs Not Cute can for sure be affected if my clothes don’t fit well, OR if styles are changing & I feel like I have not adapted my wardrobe to the change. (Jeans right now being a big example, if you love bootcut hooray! They are back.) Also my hair—if I’m not happy with it, it really affects my personal Cute vs Not Cute.
I oscillate between thinking “I look great for someone 46!” and “OMG why am I so wrinkly, no one else has such a wrinkled face at my age.” Which is silly. Also, wrinkles show that I have a very expressive face and I always have. This is PART OF ME AND IT’S A GOOD PART and also, wrinkly.
A couple things: bootcut jeans are VERY fashionable right now! I mean, we don’t need external sources to tell us what to wear, but you know, they are very On Point right now.
I wear my hair in a bun probably 5-6 days a week. My natural hair colour is now grey/ white, 100%. So when my roots come in, and I put my hair up, I see white/ grey streaks and I can’t always tell if it’s roots or if I am going bald in places. Is that my scalp I see? Or just my roots? I don’t know. I spend a lot of time trying to cover them up, but I don’t want to use those root colour sprays just in case it is my scalp and I look like a guy with a combover. I mean, if I AM going bald, there’s not much to be done about it. But.
Last thing: I love graphic t-shirts and am hoping to get some from Fuckbois of Literature for Christmas.
Off to learn more about FBOL. Sounds interesting. Does one need to have read lots of classic literature to enjoy?
No, I don’t think you do. I mean, it sometimes helps when the podcast discusses particular books, but not always is it necessary. Sometimes it’s great to listen to a podcast about a book, even when I haven’t read that particular book, and sometimes it covers things like Greek myths, which is fun and interesting.
This is so relatable. Also I feel like the constant stress when leaving the house (and also when staying in the house with everyone) makes it that much harder to feel cute. I don’t feel carefree and bouncy no matter how I look.
This post is so timely. I find I’m sliding into the change-in-season blahs about everything including my self-esteem. Contributing factors include:
I pinched a nerve in my back in July and it’s been a long climb out of pain into being able to do the most minimal of exercise and I miss my zumba class – my friends in the class, the music, the high I get from a good work out. It was ok in the summer when the weather was nice, but now it’s become cold and rainy and I still can’t go to the class and it’s getting me down about everything.
I am still mainly WFH so I’ve let my hair get longer than it has in the past and I haven’t had it cut in while and it has . . . no style. I put it up every day and that’s fine, I just kind of miss having some kind of style in my hair, but I’m not going to pay $$$ to get a fancy haircut that I need to style every day when I don’t go anywhere. I’m in a hair catch-22 of my own making.
On the one day a week I go to work I seem to have forgotten how to dress for the office or do my makeup or really make myself presentable. I’m sure this is exaggerated but I feel inept at officing.
Same here! I have forgotten how to dress myself! I am now permanently WFH but we do go to church once a week, and it’s not a Dressy church but I still want to look nice, and every week I just cannot figure out what to wear or how to fix my face. And literally no one will care! Other people come to church in shorts and t-shirts and no make-up! It is definitely a ME problem.
I really appreciate your posts about body image. I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately because I’ve been thinking about body image a lot lately, and how impossible to it is to find anyone to really talk to about feeling complicated about the whole thing because everyone’s experience is so different. I self-identify as a skinny person who feels positively about how cute other people’s clothes look at all kinds of weights…except now I’m going through life as a not skinny person really struggling to feel positively about how cute clothes look on me. I keep ping-ponging back and forth in my mindset. Sometimes I’m reminding myself that I never planned to be this age and hoping I could pass for 10 years younger, and that I’m actually FINE with being roughly the same size as a woman who gets referred to in historical descriptions as “an imposing figure.” Better than fine! If I were my great-great-grandchild, I’d feel proud. But then – maybe I could lose a little weight? Or just look at pictures of people my age who were heavier a few years ago and hope that something similar might just kind of happen to me too? And I have male friends who used to think I was attractive when we were younger, and it’s impolite to check in to see if they still do, but they have mostly gotten more attractive so that’s annoying. And my husband…who’s struggled with his weight the whole time we’ve been together…still sees weight loss as a calories in, calories out situation that he’s going to get right on any second now. I don’t know, maybe it’ll get better in a few years when I’m more unambiguously middle-aged. Or if I finally find the right clothes. I want to be able to look at pictures and not think “Good God, is that me?” again, and I think that has to be a mindset thing.
(Also, shout out to the homeless? man who passed me the other day as I was walking and said, “With all due respect…you look good.” I mean, no one should ever do that, especially to a woman walking alone, but in the moment it was just so funny to imagine him trying to figure out how to balance his urge to catcall with whatever article he had just read about being respectful to women. We’re all just out here trying our best to live up to our ideals.)
Also thank you for bringing up the important issue of hair that stops being blond while refusing to actually turn brown. It’s very disorienting. Especially since my kids somehow think it’s black…do I need to get their eyes checked?
I dearly love your description of his inner struggle. Gonna be giggling over that for a while.
“With all due respect, you look good…” Gah I’m snorting!
“I self-identify as a skinny person…” I LOVE THIS. Same, scale be damned.
I love to read your thoughts on this and feel much of it as a 45 year old who is aging and changing normally!
One thought to add (not to say you’re not trying in your appearance, but just adding to the conversation) – As much as I think, oh my appearance doesn’t matter,working on my style (more than I normally would. Jeans and Birkenstock’s are my go to.) does give one a Boost! One way I connected with that idea was through an online workshop with Stasia Savasuk. She advocates for feeling good in your body, bucking the ‘this is what you’re supposed to look like’ trends/ body image, and dressing to make your self happy (mostly through thrifting/ styling what’s in your closet already). She has a lot of great posts on her Instagram to get the gist of it. Integrating her way of thinking has encouraged me to wear accessories/ clothing that I might save for a special occasion and trying new combos.
This might be controversial, but I got a lot more out of her IG than her course. Her IG is great.
I just found Stasia on IG and THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
I’ve been feeling this so much lately. The comfy jeans just aren’t cute. They look frumpy – only when I catch a glance in a mirror someplace else, in my mirrors I look perfectly fine.
My hair also continues to darken and is it getting thin? I don’t know. My mom’s is super thin, but mine has always been thick. Is it getting thin spots? No? Maybe? Also, at the start of covid I had a pixie, now I have the mid-neck length hair. Do I wait for it to hit my collarbone or do I cut it off and go back to the pixie? I think it was cute and different, but my old stylist kept cutting it in a “busy mom” cut when I wanted it to be funky and edgy.
I just feel frumpy and dowdy. We moved to a new town where everyone seems to be so much more put together than me. Maybe it’s just the PTO women who are running everything, but I’m having trouble getting my groove here. My style has changed, but I just can’t find anything that fits. I can’t say how many hundreds of $$ I’ve spent and then refunded trying on jeans. Nothing works.
I just want to feel good and cute in my clothes. Like a person. Maybe like a woman. And not like a mom. I really just want to feel like me and that feeling is maddeningly elusive right now.
I went through this myself around the time I hit 40. One thing I did–and it took a few months–was to stop buying anything new for a while and just try on everything in my closet in different combinations. If something was unflattering or I just didn’t like it, out it went. After some time doing this I had a much better idea of what looked good and what I liked and what I needed to add to my closet, and ever since then I’ve had an easier time shopping.
Also, I find dresses to be the easiest way to look pulled together. Not dressy-dresses, just the easy jersey kind from Old Navy, with a jean jacket and tights if it’s chilly, with Converse or sandals or boots, and a long necklace. People think you really made an effort when it actually took less time to get dressed than if you’d tried to match a top and pants!
I am glad/sad that I am not the only one constantly peering at my hair, wondering if I am seeing Too Much Scalp.
The phenomenon of Clothing That Used To Be Cute But Now Is Not is so frustrating and mysterious! I cannot count the number of times I have asked my husband for reassurance that I looked okay and he has answered in bafflement that of COURSE I look okay, I am wearing the exact same outfit I have been wearing for the past five years. But sometimes it just LOOKS FRUMPY. Why???? Minute differences in seasonal/hourly light refraction?????
External validation can be SO VALIDATING, as per its name. Recently I saw some people I hadn’t seen in years, and they were so nice and said lovely things like how I looked so great and glowy and healthy, and it made me FEEL great and glowy and healthy when only hours before I had been deeply glum about my appearance in every possible way. This makes me think that we need to spread the validation and ALWAYS say something nice to people, whether we know them or not. Perhaps it will come back to us.
I wonder if this is it, though. With masks and distancing and everything being online we are just not seeing each other. And, without seeing faces I feel so disconnected from people. I do need to make more of an effort to give compliments and spread validation. It totally makes my day when someone does that for me. And, I love making someone else’s day brighter.
I love this so much: ” This makes me think that we need to spread the validation and ALWAYS say something nice to people, whether we know them or not. Perhaps it will come back to us.” – yes, yes, yes
I have no coherent responses to any of this, except to say, I get it.
And also, Rogaine often works. I cannot CANNOT miss a single evening application, but I’ve been using it for six years now and my hair is holding steady. (If I skip a day, there’s a little flurry of hair loss a few weeks later and then it stabilizes/grows again.)
I was in my mid-forties and fretting about my definitely thinning hair, and a friend said that she knew someone who swore by it, and I tried it, and I will never stop.
Also, just in case anyone is as unaware as I was, it’s OTC. You do not need to wait until your next doctor’s appointment to try.
(Also also! Maybe your hair is not thinning! Maybe it’s just fretfulness! And why should we think thinning hair is bad anyway! Aging is FINE!)
(I’m super glad it works for me.)
The neck skin!! I’ve started noticing it in every single picture. It’s like it’s deteriorating right before my eyes.
*This* I have Zoom calls where I’m like looking at everyone’s neck, and thinking, “Yep, mine is definitely the worst.” I swear I got a Grandma neck when I turned 40. Not fair
Life is too short for shirts that don’t work. Can you afford new ones? Get some! Donate the iffy ones. Jeans are harder but also worth it. If you like fun Converse and graphic tees, wear them! There are fewer rules about “what to wear” than there used to be, and the rules were dumb anyway.
Yes. Even though I have more or less always struggled with my body image, in my now mid/late 40s it’s a different set of cards. The frumpiness feel is real. I have finally to decided that if a piece of clothing makes me feel dowdy, it’s out. Doesn’t matter what I paid for it or if I’ve only worn it twice. Out.
And why do I feel like my skin has aged 15 years in the past 3? I looked younger than my age and fun and then… I just didn’t. I look my age. And yes, it shouldn’t bother me. And yet it does.
Long-winded way of saying: once again, I’m grateful for your writing because you (and this community of Swistlelites) make me feel I’m not alone.
Ahhh, same here. I looked younger than my age and suddenly I don’t (well, suddenly, I had a baby at 40 so there are reasons, but still). It’s not that I necessarily enjoyed looking younger (cue not being taken seriously at work until recently), but I feel like somehow I got robbed of the 10 years that I just jumped in appearance.
I think there are several factors that probably lead to feeling cute vs not cute. One is hormones, obviously. The other might be that we, as women, finally found our stride and confidence in our thirties and now we aren’t in our thirties and are feeling insecure about it.
I don’t think you’ve “aged out” of Converse and graphic t-shirts. Wear what you love and makes you feel confident. So, whether or not bootcut jeans are “in style” right now, but you love them; wear them. I, personally, don’t feel confident in bootcut jeans because I am so short; so when I wear them I feel frumpy. But when I wear skinny jeans with cute shoes, I generally feel more confident; i.e., cute.
And, as Suzanne noted; external validation is always welcome and maybe, as women we should all be validating each other more often.
I am 68. After a year of staying home (thanks, pandemic!) I decided to up my clothing game and bought a few new things. I donated the things I wasn’t wearing, or that made me feel bad when I had them on. I tried to analyze WHY they felt bad (too wide, too short, too bulky, etc.). I shopped online and sent a LOT of stuff back. Clothes are better now. But the #1 thing I do to feel cute is to spritz a wickedly expensive perfume once or twice a day. It’s an instant mood lifter, and even if I’m the only one who smells it, I feel attractive.
I can also appreciate “a big fellow, about my age, with a beard”. I feel like they don’t get nearly enough love!
I am currently dealing with a hair cut that I don’t love and I have found the following thought to be encouraging: we are rapidly entering HAT SEASON.
I feel this way every fall, because that’s when I leave behind my cute summer dresses and get back into pants. And pants suck. They really do.
Re: your tees. Have you checked your bra straps and bands? The XL tees might be fine, and it’s your bras that need refreshing or re-adjusting.
OOoh as a fellow dress lover, have you tried cute sweatshirt dresses with leggings in the fall/winter? Because pants do indeed suck.
SWEAT. SHIRT. DRESSES!?!?!? I have some sweater dresses but this has just blown my mind. I’m off to thredup right now to look for some.
I saw some at Old Navy a little while ago. I got my daughter one at Goodwill last year, her little 6 year old self loved it to pieces.
YESSSSS I got one at Old Navy and a handful at Nordstrom Rack. It’s like wearing a hug.
Ha ha ha! Also googling…
“And certainly none of us would want to tie ANY part of our value to our physical attractiveness TO BEGIN WITH!! But I am just saying, I felt cuter after that exchange.”
I THINK ABOUT THIS ALL THE TIME. I think nice people complimenting other people nicely is good and makes people feel good and can be done without any implication that the thing you’re complimenting is THEIR ONLY THING OF VALUE or any need to overthink the interaction :)
Well firstly I totally hear you on out-of-date hair identity. As a child I had beautiful copper coloured curls – which of course I never appreciated. I also have very pale, pink-toned freckle skin of the kind that goes with that hair colour. But then when I was in my early 20s, it just… faded/darkened to the point that someone on my post-grad course mentioned they wouldn’t describe me as a redhead at all. And I was HORRIFIED. Combine that with the fact that I’ve gone fairly grey fairly early and I’ve been dyeing my hair to be the colour I think it *should* naturally be ever since. Which is actually an extremely hard colour to achieve because dye always seems to make hair too ginger or too purple tinged and basically I just want what it used to be, which is Julianne Moore coloured.
Secondly! I think you need a personal shopping appointment. In the UK they’re free at department stores if you book them in, I don’t know if somewhere like Nordstrom offer them? Or alternatively there are monthly delivery boxes here called Stitchfix, where you put in your measurements and sizes and style preference and they send you a box of clothes every month – you just keep what you like, but the idea is that it pushes you out of your comfort zone.
Hair identity seems particularly strong in people who had red hair as kids: I know at least three adults who have professed to be redheads, and I don’t see any red in their hair at all – one went blonde, and two went brown before they met me.
This is SO TRUE. I had red hair until my mid-twenties, when I had my first child. Then my hair went brown and her hair came in red. I still think I’m a redhead, though.
I could go on forever about cute/not feeling cute in clothes, but a recent pandemic-related change to how I do my job is the worst generator of not feeling cute right now.
My job involves attending a regular monthly meeting and writing minutes about it. Before the pandemic, meetings were in person and we used a small standalone audio recorder to record them. We moved most meetings to Zoom, but for most of this time, I did not have a webcam, so you just hear my voice on the recordings but you don’t see me.
We finally got webcams for our office computer set-ups, and now when I write the minutes, I have to look at myself in close-up detail on the recordings as I work. I’ve learned that I curl my upper lip when I’m skeptical of an idea that’s being presented! That isn’t particularly cute. And it feels pretty obvious to me that double-chin encroachment is happening at a rate that I’d previously been denying.
Swistle, if you have a dermatologist you like, you could also ask them about your hair thinning if you’re worried. I did at one point have that thought too, and my dermatologist basically said my hair looked fine to her, but also mentioned rogaine if it ever got to the point where it really was thinning.
I also just had to do meeting minutes from the recording of our monthly meeting. I was wearing my current favorite outfit. I’m trying really really hard not to lose faith in that outfit right now.
I need to do a better job of consciously picking out a favorite outfit for meeting days, as opposed to something that is merely clean!
If you’re still on Zoom, something basic (black with a flattering neckline? But not a low neckline in case you have to bend over and fiddle with the camera) with good earrings is best. Now I’m in a conference room with a big overhead camera such that I have to watch myself from the side, and I’m not sure there’s any saving myself…we aren’t meant to have to watch ourselves from the side. Maybe I need to find a different place to sit at the table.
And save your actual favorite outfits for times you will feel cute in them because you are also having fun. This is very rarely meetings where minutes are involved.
Okay, I’ll go.
I haven’t gotten a haircut since before the pandemic, and I swear, I think my hair hasn’t grown at all in all that time. Is it possible for hair to just not grow for more than 1.5 years? Maybe I’m misremembering my pre-pandemic hair length, but it’s making me nervous for future haircuts. If I ever get one, which is an open question at this point.
And I’m tired of the general social message that it’s not okay to not be okay with a weight gain, because not only is my weight up to a place I’m not comfortable with, BUT ALSO I feel like I’m in the wrong for not being happy with myself as I am. I’m avoiding looking directly in the mirror. I’m having to make a bit of an effort when I’m getting up from the floor. I feel like I’m lumbering when my kid wants to have a dance party. My clothes don’t look or feel how I want, and I have zero desire to buy new clothes.
I started deliberately working on weight loss again about a week ago, and am already wishing it would go faster and with less thought than is reasonable.
NECK BANGS.
To participate: I lost 20 lbs during 2020 and was feeling sort of cute, then I gained it alllllll back in 2021 and I am feeling Very Large and Uncute now. I also didn’t cut my hair for 18+ pandemic months and was feeling sort of like a pioneer lady who needs a new bonnet after month 16, so I mustered my (liquid) courage and gave myself a Lockdown Youtube Unicorn haircut, which looks surprisingly ok-ish. I’m lucky my hair is wavy because it mitigates the mullet-y factor, or else I’m totally kidding myself.
I’m so glad you posted this! Your hair sounds like mine, in it’s progression from blonde to brown-ish. I agree that brown hair is great, but mine settled for a dirty, dishwasher, mouse-colored brown and didn’t match up with my What I Look Like idea at all either. I haven’t had good experiences with dying my hair in the past, plus I’m very uninterested in color upkeep, so I gave the John Frieda Sheer Blonde lightening shampoo and conditioner a try and was super pleased with the result. It lightened my hair up enough to where it felt like me again, I definitely recommend it!
I’d like to put this out there for thoughts and consideration: lately I’ve been considering getting juvederm injections to slightly strengthen my jawline and chin, which have softened considerably now that I’m in my late 30s. Part of me thinks “this is dumb.” But then another part of me is like, it’s non permanent, and I don’t even spend money on getting my hair dyed or nails done or any waxing or eyebrow maintenance, which scores of women do. So why can’t this just be my thing that I care about appearance-wise? Isn’t the goal of feminism to REMOVE any specific sense of what a woman should or shouldn’t do?! So why feel bad if that’s what I want to do? No really, I am asking.
This is so interesting! I also consider myself rather low-maintenance with the attention I spend on appearance (simple, infrequent haircuts, natural color [except 2 years ago, when I turned 50 & went with purples/indigos], little makeup).
BUT when I was in my late 40s, I had some moles removed from my face. I felt like they were the first thing people would notice about me, so they really bothered me. Absolutely no regrets! Also, when I turned 50, I had microblading done with my (blonde) eyebrows. So the eyebrows and mole removal really upped my confidence. I don’t feel bad about it at all, and it makes me sympathetic to others who want to change something that I wouldn’t think was an issue (like an ex who felt self-conscious about having large pores on his nose — whaaa? Or breast implants — definitely not for me! but if it is positive for them the way my mole/eyebrows things were positive for me, then yay for them!) Don’t know whether this helps, but I think you should go for it without any apologies!
I have all kinds of thoughts on feeling cute/not feeling cute, but I will limit to this one: Make your hair be the color you think your hair actually is, even it is no longer that color. I was a towheaded child whose fine, thin, horrible hair actually darkened to a nice streaky blonde color during my teens and 20s. And then, four pregnancies later (and the accompanying so-worth-it children that resulted) my hair was brown. I felt out of sync for 15 years until my hairdresser convinced me to get highlights and it was magical. Like going back to real time after Daylight Savings Artificial Time–things just clicked into place for my self-image, which is basically, “Well, I’m fat, but I have GREAT hair.”
My husband and I recently had a conversation around this topic. And during our discussion (argument), I couldn’t figure out how to phrase things appropriately for him to GET IT.
I had surgery scheduled on a Thursday morning. It was a disfiguring surgery for newly diagnosed breast cancer and I am young (35) and I’m pretty vain also to be perfectly honest. Wednesday night I was showering, shaving and lotioning, ALL OF THE THINGS. I took time to wash, dry AND curl my hair. My husband was BAFFLED. “Why go through all of that trouble NOW?” He just couldn’t grasp it. I was so frustrated and emotional that I couldn’t explain why. I’m nervous. I can control THIS. It makes me feel better. I finally gave up and said “you don’t understand it and you don’t have to understand it, it’s not happening to you and I don’t have to explain myself.”
But it is TOTALLY about feeling cute vs. not feeling cute. When I feel “cute,” I feel in control. I feel happier. I feel like even though something bad is happening, I’m confident and secure.
I’m sorry to hear about your surgery. I hope it went well. I have a surprise surgery scheduled for next week and I agree with your advice to look your best going into surgery. Best wishes.
I might have an answer to your T-shirt dilemma! I recently learned that there is a difference between XXL and 2XL in sizing. XXL is a half size bigger than XL and 2XL is bigger in both size and length to an XXL. Maybe you just need an XXL instead of 2X? I learned this from a plus size/thrifting fashion blogger named @FashionFixMN. She is great inspiration for feeling cute with affordable clothes.
Yes to everything above. The frump slump is real. I felt Pretty Cute all summer, but then school started and life got busy and I had to actually leave the house dressed and presentable…. and I feel dowdy. Part of my problem is DH hitting his midlife crisis and embarking on a major glow up. He has no qualms about buying expensive supplements and going for 2 hour workouts (right at bedtime! leaving me with 4 kids to wrangle!) in his pursuit of a new body. Even more irritating is that he is having immediate and impressive results. He looks good. I do not. Thanks to a bad pelvic organ prolapse after the last baby, I can’t workout even if I had the time. I can’t lift anything over 10 lbs the rest of my life, so hearing him crowing about increasing his lifts is particularly galling. I fear we will end up one of those couples that raise eyebrows – how did HE end up with HER?
Maybe I need some online shopping therapy. Some of the excellent suggestions in the gift ideas post were very appealing.
Oh *hugs* I’ve been there with POP after my last (also number 4)! Have you tried physical therapy? It didn’t work for me – she was all about biofeedback, which, ugh. But, I follow a bunch of pelvic floor PTs on Instagram and I have done the MUTU system. And, hear me out, because I absolutely HATE MUTU’s ads, but the program does work – or at least, I will say, it worked for me and I was beginning to despair that nothing would.
If you do want to get out and sweat – biking and swimming were my go-tos for a while. Also, yoga, especially the relaxed stretchy kind and just doing Corpse Pose when the teacher insists on doing some AB workout.
My own Not Cute issue is my glasses. Due to terrible astigmatism and corneal scarring, contacts don’t work for me on a daily basis and I am terrified of Lasik. I try to get cute frames and change them up every year or two, but I look so much better without them! And then I think, who am I trying to impress?! My husband likes me as-is, I’m not trying to Catch a Man here, why does it bother me so much? But it does. (Not enough to do Lasik but still.)
I don’t want to sound like I’m pressuring you or anything, but I have had Lasik and it was the least painful and easiest recovery ever. I had it in 2016 and still have 2020 vision now. I’m over 40, so my eye doctor still thinks my close vision will vanish any second now, but so far that is not the case. Anyway, just wanted to put in a good word for Lasik, which is the self improvement surgery I am most grateful for!
This post was so timely for me. I read it moments after I had a stream of hateful thoughts toward myself after looking in the mirror for a while. I have noticed a pronounced hormonal impact on my self esteem in recent years. I will feel fine a lot of the time, and then I will descend into a pit of self-criticism and appearance-related despair, in which I am FLOODED with negative self-talk that feels as out of control as a panic attack or an anxiety spiral. It’s honestly very weird. Like I’m puttering along in life and then about once a month it’s like, I am HIDEOUS; how does anyone even BEAR to look at me for two minutes; my body is repulsive; my scalp is visible; my hair is just dumb in every way; I’m as ugly now as when I was in sixth grade, etc etc etc etc etc. AND there are non-appearance-related Intrusive Thoughts about what a failure I am and how I have accomplished nothing, failed to live up to my potential and on and on. It doesn’t even feel like something that would respond to therapy because it’s so involuntary and probably biologically driven (hormones, sigh).
So anyway I relate to this so much I could weep and I’m so glad you wrote about it.
I want to have comforting drinks around a fire with everyone in this comment section.
Also, I have learned a lot of very useful tips (I hate my thinning hair; why don’t I do something about it vs just being sad? SWEATSHIRT DRESSES are a thing that exists!) so thank you, ladies.
I have been spending more time than I like looking in the mirror at the sun damage on my forehead that seemed to appear out of nowhere this summer. I now am pretty good about hats and sunscreen, so this is damage that likely occurred years ago, and I’m sure most people don’t even notice, only to me, it is a beacon, shining like the Bat Signal, but to signal to the world the folly of my youth. It goes hand in hand with what I feel is an inability to make a high ponytail work anymore. I have longer bangs right now, which should cutely frame my face, but instead seem to attract like magnets all the strays that have escaped the ponytail, so my whole head is frizzy but also kind of greasy-looking at the same time? I’ve taken to wearing my hair in a lower ponytail, which can look quite cute, except when I wear it while walking, in which case, it looks ridiculous with the giant-billed visor I must now wear (cf. sun damage).
And I don’t even know what’s going on with my body shape? I lost the pandemic weight I gained, partly by getting back to regular exercise and partly by dropping certain pandemic-inspired eating habits. And I lost a few more unexpected pounds after having to further restrict my diet due to a mild medical issue. So I was quite excited the other day, when picking up my new reading glasses, to take a look at the overall effect in my eye doctor’s full length mirror. Only I didn’t look like I’d lost the pandemic weight. I looked like the pandemic weight had simply melted from one part of my body down to another? And yes, I feel ridiculous for letting the issue bother me at all. It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. My clothes all fit again, so I can stop buying new cozy sweatpants (I will never stop buying new cozy sweatpants), and there is no other reason to let this be a concern. But I can’t help it. I am obsessed with obsessing over the goopy wax candle that is now my hips and backside.
I feel like my “not cute” feeling periods have more to do with my current mental state than anything else. And good lord WINTER is upon us and I hate that it will soon be dark before 5pm.
As a child who was teased mercilessly over where the flood was during elementary school (and or middle, it was K8 and I don’t remember when just that kids are assholes), I SO FEEL YOU on jean inseams! And I’m tall so my choices are already 1) long enough bootcut so long as I wear flats, 2) are these high waters? How is this not high water length, or 3) laughably high water length.
Since the pandemic, I’ve also gone down a rabbit hole and discovered barefoot shoes. Mostly because after a year and a half wearing slippers my feet refused to be contained by my old shoes. But now that I’ve embraced it wholeheartedly, I forgot (or ignored) the part where your feet will continue to change size/shape/volume and have now discovered that all my NEW shoes are probably too narrow and oh god how do I have wide feet they don’t actually look wide (except my pinky toe is clearly objecting to my current favorite pair of shoes) and they were already quite big enough for women’s shoes before this tyvm.
I’m feeling this. I just turned 49 and I can attest to experiencing (or perhaps *shudder* just starting to experience) some of the shape changes that come with later life. I lost over 35 lbs last year but still couldn’t button up some favourite pants or shorts that I’d been looking forward to wearing again. They had fit comfortably when I’d bought them at a weight higher than the one I was when re-trying them on, but my middle had just… thickened.
And while I do think buying some new pants that fit my new shape better would help, I still don’t want to go to a mall full of people to do any shopping yet. When I do, I’m holding the line against the once-again-popular “mom” jeans though. I’ve never had much of a waist so even when I was young and lithe they were never comfortable on me.