How To Trick Your Brain Into Loving The Physical Features You’re Most Uncomfortable With, According To A Fashion Expert
Your features are not the problem.
PeopleImages.com - Yuri A | Shutterstock Learning to love yourself can be a challenge, especially when unattainable beauty standards seem to be everywhere you look, from social media and advertisements to movies and TV. It's all too easy to compare your appearance to airbrushed photos of models and Facetuned images of influencers.
Still, according to Zizzi Donna, an online fashion expert, anyone can learn to love and appreciate their physical features — you just have to train your brain.
Here's how to trick your brain into loving the physical features you're most uncomfortable with:
According to Donna, it all comes down to the media you consume and the people you follow online. If you only follow influencers who look nothing like you, you're setting yourself up to view beauty as something that looks nothing like you.
"You’re training your brain to see just one type of beauty," she insisted.
“The more we see something, the more we like it. This is how our brain works,” Donna explained, and she’s not wrong. This phenomenon is called the mere-exposure effect and it refers to our tendency to prefer things just because they are familiar to us. “That's why it's so important to get used to your own features,” she added.
You must shift your perspective, and Donna explained how you can do so.
She suggested compiling photos of public figures who look like you.
“Go and find influencers, actresses, public figures that look like you,” Donna advised. “Go on Pinterest and create a board filled with women that share more features with you and look at them every day.”
“You can easily retrain your brain to see beauty from different perspectives,” she continued, “and you can easily make your brain like your features that you feel uncomfortable with.”
Donna frequently posts content about her “strong nose,” a feature that many people feel uncomfortable about. In another TikTok, she shared “10 seconds of eye candy” — a compilation of beautiful women with similar noses to her own.
“A bit of inspiration for all my lovely ladies who [are] learning to appreciate their powerful features,” she wrote.
Instead of allowing society to condition you about what is beautiful, follow her advice, and recondition yourself. By looking at these images every day, you'll gradually learn to embrace the features that make you feel the most self-conscious about.
Everyone is beautiful in their own right.
While society may condition us to see beauty in one way, the truth is that beauty is entirely subjective. Everyone has their own definition, one that changes over time. Even society's definition of beauty has changed drastically over the years and will continue to change.
Although it's easier said than done, it's so valuable to embrace your own beauty and accept (and learn to love) the physical features you were born with. After all, "your features aren’t the problem," Donna insisted, "the way you see them is!"
Mina Rose Morales is a writer and photojournalist with a degree in journalism. She covers a wide range of topics, including psychology, self-help, relationships, and the human experience.