Full text and summary of The Lip Bar CEO Melissa Butler’s talk titled “Why You Think You’re Ugly” at TEDxDetroit conference. Melissa Butler, a beauty disruptor and self-esteem advocate, shares her frustration with linear beauty standards and the impact they have on individuals’ self-worth. She discusses the need to change the way we think about beauty and extend acceptance to those who look different. The solution lies in understanding our triggers and cutting off negative influences. The speaker encourages self-acceptance and extending love and acceptance to others.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
I am a beauty disruptor. I am a self-esteem advocate, but more than anything, I am a woman who’s fed up with linear beauty standards. I grew up right here in Detroit, where the ideal image for black girls is light skin with long hair.
Well I’m brown-skinned. I was always curvier. I had a gap in between my teeth, and I had a flat butt, still do. But I remember vividly overhearing a guy describe me with the attributes that I didn’t have. She’s not even light-skinned. She had a flat butt, but at this time, you couldn’t tell me a thing. I thought I was so cute.
And that day taught me a valuable lesson. It taught me how to love myself wholly, and more importantly, it taught me how to never allow someone else’s opinion of me to determine my value. For the last six years, I’ve built a cosmetic company with the idea to change the way we think about beauty for ourselves, and ultimately, how we extend that to those who look differently from us.
When I started making lipstick in my kitchen, it wasn’t because I was passionate about makeup. No. It was because I was frustrated that attractiveness was consistently looked at through a singular lens. Today, if you search the word beauty, you’ll end up with a sea of fair-skinned, thin, young woman, as if good looks don’t come in any other form.
And so, when we have those ideas in the back of our mind, we really start to think that we’re ugly. We look at the beautiful people, and we think, man, they have it all. They’re rich. They’re in love. They’re happy. They’re successful. And I could have that, too, if I just had, if I just changed, we start to think that we’re not enough of something, that we’re lacking in some areas, that causes us to stifle opportunities for ourselves because we feel as though we don’t belong and we don’t deserve.
And even worse, we extend that low confidence and that lack of confidence and that low self-esteem, we extend that onto our sisters, our friends, our cousins, because if I’m not enough, she’s definitely not enough, right?
For years, women were taught that our value was directly linked with our looks, our ability to get married, our ability to have children. And even today, now that women are starting businesses, taking office, taking over the world, essentially, we’re still relegated to this idea that beauty and our looks are most important. We see this in every industry, from Serena dominating on the tennis court, to Hillary running for president, all the way down to Louisiana, where a little girl wasn’t permitted to go to school because of her braided hairstyle.
Now, braids have always been a longstanding part of African and African-American beauty culture. And just because you don’t practice it doesn’t mean that you can’t accept or respect it. And I don’t know about you, but the last time I checked, my hairstyle didn’t prevent me from learning. The tutu that I wear on the tennis court doesn’t prevent me from winning a grand slam. And the color suit that I wear, it certainly doesn’t make me ill-equipped to run a country.
But what’s attractiveness anyway? And shouldn’t it be subjective? Well, yes and no. But attractiveness has become a popularized understanding of our cultural footprint. What we as individuals believe is attractive is directly stemmed from our environment. That’s why men really just want to marry women just like their moms. And as much as we want to hate them for it, they can’t help it. That’s their first perspective of what beauty and love is.
Like if I were to grow up in Ghana, I would value my thick thighs a lot more than I do having grown up in the U.S. And while the world is becoming more interconnected than ever, we’re seeing that the global standard of beauty is quickly becoming the Western standard of beauty. So much so that in countries like South Africa or China, where the population is largely people of color, white women are still at the forefront of these commercial campaigns. So it doesn’t surprise me to hear that 70% of women in Lagos, Nigeria bleach their skin.
Even though skin bleaching has been linked to cancer, what that tells me is that $10 billion industry is being upheld by this idea that beauty is linear. Those women are just trying to get ahead. This idea leaves plus-sized women feeling invalid, mature women feeling as though they age out of their beauty beyond their childbearing years, and ethnic women feeling unwanted.
And don’t get me wrong, while it impacts women the most, it’s not only us who suffer. Most male CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are taller than average because height is linked to attractiveness and power. This is a multi-generational, gender-neutral issue. Our children are growing up not valuing themselves and certainly not being able to extend that love and acceptance onto their peers. Those children grow up with low self-esteem and end up being consumers of weight loss fads, of plastic surgery.
Have you guys noticed the plastic surgery trend? Surgeryon your butt and thigh is up 4,200% since the year 2000. How crazy is that? And so it makes me think back to when I was a little girl and I thought about me not having a butt. You know, if I didn’t have that confidence to keep going on, I could be one of these statistics.
So how do we transform? How do we start loving ourselves?