This is not me. In this post, I will post some images of girls I think are beautiful.

I would need to do more research to get a more varied number of looks, but for now, if seeing these pictures help open your mind to appreciating more diverse looks, it's a step in the right direction.

I did not post images of white / Chinese-looking girls because especially in Asia, I think we see plenty of those kind of looks everyday, and constantly hear that that kind of look, and pale (very white) & fair skin is beautiful.

It is, but so is tanned and dark skin.

Also, I'm sorry that I had only picked out pictures of girls this time round.

Photo credit: Zara.

Things to note: In any photo you see anywhere, colours can appear a different colour, lighter, or darker, than they actually are. In photos you see, a lot of the time someone—or some people— are treating it like a work of art; they colour-co-ordinate, or play around with colours (using colour theory), shapes, and composition to make it appear as best it can.

I have wanted to write this post for the longest time. I know so many people have written and talked about this issue, but I hope sharing my thoughts and things I personally faced growing up might help at least a soul. Caring about what we look like is something so base, in an ideal scenario one would grow up not having any issue with what they look like, and focus would instead be put on more pressing things like improving many things about the state of the world. Sure, fret over if one shirt looks nicer than the other, and admire the ways artists create beautiful / interesting pieces for the body and the world around, but a discontent with how oneself looks would never be a thing.

Growing up, I felt strange. I looked so different from my family, and the women I thought were beautiful, including my mom, looked so different from me, and I wanted to look more like them. After all, it made sense, right? They all had similarities, and they were all beautiful to me. I didn't look anything like them, therefore I wasn't beautiful. It's unfortunate how easily we put ourselves down sometimes.

It's unfortunate that for a huge chunk of my life I thought this way although I was brought up in Singapore, a small city-island filled with diverse looks. If anything, it would've made more sense if my definition of beauty covered a much wider spectrum.

My mother's heritage is wildly varied, and as for my dad, he is of Malay and Bengali mix; those were his parents background anyway, I never did ask about older generations for...reasons. I'm olive-skinned, a term I only discovered was a thing when I was... maybe 20? And that it's a good thing, apparently, to people in the west. In South-East Asia it's just a norm, or not desirable.

Growing up, I was a lot darker than most of my family members, and I felt weird about that. After a point, I had huge, frizzy (S'pore's humidity didn't help), curly hair. I told my mom I felt like a lion. My features perpetuated my feeling strange about myself too. The thinking that my darkness came from my dad most probably contributed to me not liking it too. I got the idea that he was a bad person from stories other people told me, and having something that so closely links you to someone you don't like, it felt really crappy. Some of my family members picked up on me not liking how I looked, and teased me about it. They weren't teasing me about my physical appearance, they were teasing the fact that I had a problem with it. Their form of endearment, I think, and perhaps trying to make me realise how silly I was being.

After learning of my diverse ancestry, it felt like a veil was lifted. I had wanted to look Malay (what I had associated with my mom) instead of Indian (I had been repeatedly told I looked like an Indian girl, and this I associated to my dad), but I realised what I had associated to 'looking Malay' was actually not Malay at all. they were all very mixed. This knowledge didn't make me feel better though because I still had problems with how my hair and features were, and my perception of beauty was still nothing like how I looked.

It took me a while to overcome this; Meeting creatives [stylists, makeup artists, photographers, etc.) with a different view of beauty than me and seeing how different looks inspired them in creating great visuals (whether it be photos you see when shopping online— e.g. Zara, Asos, Mango etc. or beauty (images with a focus on the face and makeup) and editorial images (examples: http://theatlasmagazine.com/category/editorial/) ] helped open my eyes.

For clothes and makeup, you need to get familiar with colours. Of course, from a purely artistic point of view, someone could tell you you can use / wear any colour you like, that there are no boundaries. And this is true. But also from an artistic perspective, colour-theory exists for a reason. We've worked out how some colours seem to go really well with certain other colours. So you might want to see what the internet, or books, or magazines say go well with your skin-tone, then put that to the test while trying other colours too to figure out what you like and don't like.

As a general note, spending more money doesn't guarantee you get something better. This is definitely the case for body / beauty products / makeup. You can get things of varying quality from each price spectrum so, as much as possible, try it out on your skin first, walk around for a day, check how it looks in different lightings, then decide if you like it.

It's fine if you don't have double eyelids. It's fine that your upper lip is a different colour than your lower one. It's fine if you've got big hair and a small face. Big, curly or wavy hair is beautiful, so is straight hair. & it's fine if you wear glasses, or have round cheeks, really fair, white, black, dark, olive, tanned, or (any shade of) peach, olive, yellow or brown skin. You've got the internet— the largest library— to source for what artists and creatives do with and how they have fun with your look.

For now, we don't get to choose what we look like. I think the more we realise how different each person looks, and the little details that set them apart, the more we can feel like we're representing ourselves, and what sets us apart. At the same time, it's interesting to see how even miles away in a different country and continent, we may share similarities in features with other peoples or mixes.

For hair, all I can advise on is research and experimentation. As with everything I would advice on, start from the base and work up; If you want less frizz, try a few shampoos and conditioners to find out which ones can help tame them. Try the ones in stores, and ones from the hairdressers. If you can get tiny 100ml or 200ml bottles to test with, that's usually enough washes to determine if they are suitable for your hair. A deep conditioner is good once a week (in place of your normal conditioner). Use the ones from the same brand and line, they're usually created to compliment each other.

A more humid the weather, sometimes calls for different products / an additional one. Talk to hairdressers. Unfortunately in my experience back in S'pore, from neighbourhood hairdressers to ones from big, well-known salons, they gave me the impression of being rather inexperienced with my type of hair =/ . So be patient, and again, it's just about exposing yourself to different places.

For glasses (spectacles), just go to many places and try all the glasses. You'll slowly find your preference. If you find a pair that you absolutely love and work well with any of your outfits, that's great! But if not, having two gives you an alternative.