MY HISTORY IS LIKE THE MOST STORY OF WOMEN when it comes to fashion and beauty. It's not a very funny story.
For most of my life, I hated my body and struggled with my appearance. Even so, at age 45 I finally discovered the tools that allowed me to love and appreciate my body and appearance. I'm about to tell you how. But first, let me tell you about my beginnings.
Around the age of 12, I began to notice that what I was wearing and how I looked was very important. I was an attractive girl who was left almost to myself to figure out how to put on clothes, wear make-up, and so on. But I do not put any blame on my mother's feet.
I think she did the best she knew, and I can not imagine that it made it easy for her to convey her beauty secrets to me, which I now know would not have been suitable for my kind of beauty. I did not have sisters to seek advice and my brothers, well, they thought that things as a child were almost a waste of time.
At the age of 13 she had very thick, thick and "small" eyebrows. And I hated them. True to my type 3, determined nature, I took quick action and removed most of my eyebrows in one night with a pair of tweezers and a bathroom mirror. I had no help and no instruction that was easily apparent from the looks of my eyebrows once I had finished.
Without knowing it better, I assumed that this new appearance was an improvement, that is, until I arrived at my seventh kind of period band where a boy next to me looked at me with horror and exclaimed: "What happened to your eyebrows?" The initiation to many years of believing that I was not attractive enough, not thin enough, and not pretty enough.
About this same time my three brothers and their friends added their two cents by mocking me with the nickname "Carol Barrel", and comments like "Hey, peg legs!" And "Crater face!" Needless to say that did not help In my opinion of my looks and body image.
In high school, had made little progress and was doing what most of the girls were doing: buy and try to use what was fashionable (except miniskirts), I could not pour my frame larger in Twiggy fashions Were rabies). My battle with weight and hatred for my body really began at age 15, which went on for the last 30 plus years. I had little inner confidence and disgust with myself because I thought I was overweight on the outside.
I never liked how I looked, and I felt more and more uncomfortable in my clothes. I pretended almost like any other fake girl, hiding my shame for my body and looking and pretending to feel good about myself. At age 17, my experiences in stores and changing rooms were a nightmare. I had gained an excess of 30 pounds at this point and created an eating disorder of binging and-oh, but I forgot the purge part, so I kept gaining weight.
Now put this picture together: a 30-pound overweight teenager who had been introduced to the fashion world five years earlier when the first supermodel and British fashion icon was a 91-pound teenager. His name was wiggy. Remember?
Guess who did not like it, its appearance, and its body at all?
You have it, yo! I hated my body, I hated how I looked, and I did not have complete self-confidence in my teenager, or female.
I pretended like every
Another feigned girl,
Hiding my shame for
My body and my appearance.
I hated to try on the clothes and had lots of arguments with my type 2, mother of soft nature who was more than confused on how to help me. I started a pattern of being late to school as I tried to outfit after outfit in the morning trying to find something that I felt decent half way in. My mom finally insisted on picking my clothes the night before which only gave me more Time to try it, hate it and reprimand me even more. I told myself that my body and outward appearance was inferior.
After years of this internal struggle, I went to college and for the first time in my life, at age 18, I found a kind of makeup at a local salon in the university town where I lived. I signed up for a personal consultation, and went to learn about putting on make-up for someone who thought they knew better than I what was right in me.
Despite the help I received (or did not get) from the make-up class, my battle with food, body image and low self-esteem continued.
Fortunately, I met a man who loved me for who I was at the time. I married Jon Tuttle when I was 22, just 4 days after my college graduation.
In marriage and maternity and the next 23 years of doing everything possible to look my best, still being influenced by fashion trends and styles, but never feeling I looked very good in them. I had the permanent in the 80's, black in the 90's and began to discover my true beauty in the 2000s!
For 33 years of my life, I was a victim of the belief that, like most women, my inability to look good in what was fashionable was my fault, and there was little I could do about it.
THE SUPERMODEL STANDARD
Unfortunately, for most of my life, all my efforts to beautify me were an effort to improve what I thought was originally flawed. My natural type of beauty is not found in the modern world of fashion and beauty. In fact, my type of physical traits would be considered as age and masculine.
If it were not for Dressing Up Your Truth, maybe I've never discovered my own unique beauty. In this phase of my life, I am incredibly grateful to be able to look beyond the current trend of antiaging techniques and products as needs to be beautiful.
Actually, it was not until I started developing Dressing Your Truth that I became interested in the world of fashion and beauty. But not for the common reasons of most women: my reasons were to find flaws and failures in the current system that had played a huge role in affecting my demeaning opinion of myself as a woman.
As I mentioned earlier, at 12 I began to look at the outside world, and at the world of fashion and beauty, as the reference to my developing woman. Because the beauty icon of the time was a 91 pound blonde type 4 female named Twiggy, I would like to bet it's safe to say that not many girls had a chance to feel beautiful.
Twiggy was the first of a long line of women who set the standard of beauty we call supermodels.
Ladies, it's been 40 years that we've been judging ourselves as women against a supermodel standard that we can never measure up to. The standard of a very tall and slim and elegant woman who looks much younger than she is what we have considered beautiful. And to make things worse, with all the improvement of the photo and airbrushing that is now carried out in the media, the superficial beauty that we face can only perpetuate a deep inner feeling of failure in the effort to feel beautiful as a woman.
The Dove campaign for real beauty (see www.dove.us) began after Dove did a worldwide study on beauty called The Real Truth About Beauty: A World Report. The Dove report confirmed its premise that the common definition of beauty had become impossible for most women to achieve. The study noted only 2 percent-yes, 2 percent-of women considered beautiful, and only 12 percent of women said they were "very satisfied" with their physical appeal. At the other end of the scale, 75 percent of respondents wanted the media to do a more responsible job of portraying the diversity of women's physical attractiveness, including size and shape, across all ages .
I'm sure you probably agree with 75 percent of women who want the media to take a different approach. It is time for us all to take a different approach to beauty.
WHERE I AM NOW ON MY JOURNEY
At the time of writing this, I'm in my fifties and I honestly feel and I think I look hot! In fact, I know I've never seen better! I love how I look, and I feel sure that what I'm wearing is perfect for me. I love to shop and find the pieces that are perfect for me. The best part, now that I know how to dress my truth, is that shopping is a breeze. I find what I want fast and what I find is always affordable.
My biggest challenge is not to ask myself what to wear, but to ask myself, "What big suit I should wear today!" I know the best color, cut and style for my hair. I know how to do it every day, so I never have a bad hair day. I no longer worry that my body is too big, or if my butt looks great. I no longer look in a wardrobe mirror in disgust thinking I can not look good until I lose 20 pounds. I look in the mirror and I love what I see. I do not have to ask my husband or my friends "Does it look good on me?" Because I know what looks good and I buy it with confidence.
Seven years ago, I began to recover my beauty. I have recovered it and I love to own it and share it. True to my type 3, ambitious nature, I built a business from what I discovered to help women around the world reclaim their beauty.
I have spent years healing my wounded female self. As you will discover as you read more in this book, I am a Type 3 woman. I learned that because I repressed my rich and dynamic Type 3 expression for most of my life, it was the cause of my lack of self-esteem. Discovering my Type and allowing me to live and dress has brought me a new life, even in my middle years.
I am grateful for my trip. It is because of my own experience that I have come to understand yours.
As my daughter Anne recently shared with me, "Mom, if you had not gone through what you have, you would never have created all the great resources you have that are helping people around the world." Reminder, Anne!
Because I know how my trip has gone, I know how theirs can turn out, too. Let's begin to regain your true nature and your true beauty so that you too can look in the mirror and love what you see, and most important, feel the love you have for yourself.
Source/Credits:
Carol Tuttle
Hope you like it!