Stop Commenting On Women's Appearance

A few weeks ago, while I was boarding a plane, one of the male flight attendants was checking me in. He looked at my passport, looked back up at me, and said "I like your hair better blonde. You should dye it back." My jaw dropped. What gives him the right—the entitlement—to comment on the way I look⁠, let alone tell me which way he prefers I look? I am not there for his consumption!

This experience really got me thinking... Where does any human get off on giving another human being their opinion on how they physically look, how they act, or even what they are eating?

It reminded me of a comment that my first boyfriend made to me about the hair on my arms. What he thought was an innocent and frivolous observation spiralled into a major insecurity of mine for the next 15 years of my life. Before that comment, I never even noticed the blonde hair on my arms. If anything I even thought it was pretty. But one simple sentence made me want to Nair, shave, trim, or cover up my poor arms for years.

After sharing my airport experience on social media, I had a girlfriend who suffers from autoimmune-derived dark undereye circle and acne tell me:

We all have an insecurity, or many insecurities, but the most distressing part about those insecurities, is that they almost always stem from a comment that someone made to us at some point in our lives. I think we all (myself included) need to put extra effort into being more kind and complimentary to one another, even to strangers. We need to teach our children to do the same, and to help them understand that whatever they say to another person may change the way that that they see themselves for the rest of their lives.

Photo by Rendiansyah Nugroho on

We are all human. We have all probably been that person to say something hurtful before, so let's just forgive ourselves and move forward in remembering one of the most valuable proverbs of them all...

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

When I see a photo of myself, my beauty is blurred by society's unrealistic expectations.

As a woman facing things like social media, photoshop, and facetune, there is an incredingly demanding paradigm of physical "perfection" that we are expected to meet. This is combined with an additional expectation that it all must appear effortlessness. We are expected to be popular and sociable but also (as women) meek and submissive. We are expected to be sexy but not "slutty." Our bodies should be toned but not muscular, because that's too masculine. Where do the contradictory demands end?

I do love the way that I look. But even then the first instinct when I see a photo of myself is to whiten my eyes, blur out the bags under my skin, hide any wrinkle or age spot, and, essentially, erase any sign of the life and joy I have experienced that is written on my face. I think I might need to shrink my nose (just a smidge). Is it normal to have a shadow between my nose and my cheek? Are my eyebrows too light? Why are we expected to have the skin of a baby, impossibly tiny noses, and hopelessly plump lips?

Let's try a compliment swap challenge, where we replace our appearance-focused praise with character-related praise. Instead of commenting on a person's outfit or makeup, we can appreciate other's acts of bravery or kindness. We should enlighten ourselves in acknowledging how often we unconsciously reinforce the notion that a woman's (or any person's) worth is nothing more than the sum of their outward image.

What happened to the realness of the women like Frida Kahlo, Josephine Baker, and Yoko Ono, whose beauty is so true and raw that it takes my breath away. Frida had a unibrow and hair on her upper lip. Her nose was pronounced, striking. Her body was perfectly imperfect; she had uneven legs from both polio and surgery after an accident. But it was not in spite of these "flaws," that she was so beautiful. It was because of them. Her beauty is so deep that seeing a photo of her sends shivers down my spine. I want to be as real and raw and beautiful as all of these women. They are beautiful for what they have accomplished, contributed to, and stood for. They are beautiful for their truth.

That is the ultimate beauty.

This article was originally published February 10, 2020.