How to Lose the Ugly in Ten Steps

A satirical piece about how the Western cosmetics industry and Eurocentric beauty standards frequently market any possible feature as insecurity that could be solved with product.

Hello everyone and welcome back! If you’re new around here, welcome. My name is Hannah and I enjoy long walks on the beach, sometimes crush caffeine tablets in my boba, and cry myself to sleep every night wondering about how my crow’s feet will look at my funeral and how it all went wrong.

Today, I am going to show you how to look beautiful in ten easy steps. Before we start, don’t forget to follow me on all my social media, and hit that bell icon so you get a notification every time I post. Now without further ado, let’s get into the tutorial.

Step 1: Don’t be ugly.

The first step to any important beauty routine starts when one is a fetus. Every beautiful person pops out of the womb already plump with youth. If you’re over the age of 12 hours and are not a glowing supermodel, then you are obviously a freak of nature and we must cover that immediately. Don’t worry, I know from experience. When I see my reflection I wonder who let an overweight bulldog enter the house! Lucky for you and me, every cosmetic company has the solution. They can solve all of your insecurities and skin-deep need for perfection with product placement and profit.

Step 2: Skin

Just because you want to be drop-dead gorgeous does not mean you have to have a deathly complexion. Any good start to applying makeup or just going about your day is skincare. The most important thing to remember about skincare is that the more likely a product’s price tag will cause you to put a second mortgage on your house, the more likely it is going to work. If you are not able to afford good skincare marketed to you, then you are simply too poor to be beautiful — which is a pity. Thankfully, you can follow these next steps even if you don’t have the proper skincare, but you will be put at a terrible disadvantage. The ‘e’ in ‘vitamin E’ stands for expense!

Step 3: Priming

Next, we are going to prime. Now, you probably have moon craters for pores but we can fix that with primer. The best kind should be one with a thick yet slippy texture. Just spackle it on your brick face to fool people into thinking your skin has no texture whatsoever. Your face has to be so smooth it lacks any possible friction, so much so that a toddler could slide off of your skin like lubricated playground equipment. The ‘s’ in ‘smooth’ stands for silicone!

Step 4: Foundation

With foundation, the best type of formula for this is one that has a skin-like finish and a weightless feel but with maximum coverage. We want to make it look like our skin is naturally flawless and airbrushed but obviously use a product that’s designed to obscure what is naturally a problem area, to begin with. It is also paramount that you pick the correct shade for your complexion.

If you are often referred to as ‘fair’, ‘light’, ‘beige’, ‘pale beige’, ‘fair beige’, ‘light beige’, or ‘ivory’ (a timeless classic), go a couple of shades darker so you’ll look less placid and sickly but fit perfectly into the ‘racially ambiguous’ zone. You can appear ‘glowing’, ‘healthy’ and ‘exotic’ without experiencing any of the grievances that people in marginalised groups with darker complexions have to deal with on a daily basis. If you have a complexion deeper than slightly aged paper, it is quite unfortunate that you are not the type of ‘healthy’, ‘glowing’ and ‘exotic’ that makeup companies think are worth marketing to in the first place, so best of luck! Hide every single speck of pigment on your skin by completely blanking out your face with an entirely new colour. Apply with a damp sponge or brush to cover your complexion. The ‘m’ in ‘melanin’ stands for marginalisation!

Step 5: Concealer

When wrinkles and the possibility of people seeing my actual face haunt my every waking moment to the point that I can’t think of anything else but that piddly patch of pigmentation on my forehead, I don’t sleep. This means I often carry dark and sunken under-eye bags the size of shopping totes. Like many individuals working overtime or late shifts, it is common to try and trick people into believing you are a put-together, functioning human in society who is always bright, chipper, and ready to tackle anything and everything the day wallops at you — including self-esteem issues. One way to do this is to not scare people with the eyes of Nosferatu.

Although institutions reinforce unhealthy work ethics that cause people to sacrifice their wellbeing for deadlines, normalising all-nighters and sleeplessness, you can either use a peach-toned concealer to correct blue tones under the eyes or a shade lighter than your foundation to highlight and brighten. Concealers that are highly pigmented, non-drying, self-setting, creaseless, correcting, luminous, lifting, pore-filling, reduce the appearance of fine lines, age-reversing and pay your taxes with a doe-foot applicator, are ideal to highlight your under-eyes with the illusion of a bouncy, bountiful, and youthful glow. Cast a pretence that you are well-rested and had endless hours of beauty sleep when you most definitely have not. This can also assist with the facade of being a brighter person, and less like your mental wellbeing is hanging by very frayed strands of desperation. The ‘c’ in ‘coverage’ stands for conceal don’t feel, don’t let them know!

Step 6: Sculpting

A usual rule-of-thumb when it comes to bronzing, contour and highlight is that warmth and shading bring areas back (like a shadow) and highlight brings areas forward. When combined they give dimension to the face. Do you know what doesn’t have dimension? Fat faces. As a fellow plump dumpling, I understand that I am not seen as conventionally attractive according to modern standards. It has only been in recent years that larger frames are considered attractive and complimented as ‘thicc’ rather than ‘ugly fatass’ since hourglass figures have been popularised and gawked at in internet spaces. But we must remember that even if you’re packing in the trunk, you must have a thin waist because of dimension.

Back to face sculpting. Highlight on the high points of the face such as the nose or chin, if it doesn’t look like you can stack books on your cheekbones then you need to pack on more highlight. Blind the bigots with your beaming bone structure! Cut the cheeks with a cream or powder formula that beautifully blends into the skin with a cool or neutral undertone to sculpt, or even a warmer undertone to bronze. The contouring products must be applied to the hollow of the cheeks and chin to erase any possible hint of a double chin. We want to be thicc, but not that kind of thicc. Double chinning is sinning. The ‘c’ in chiselled stands for chub!

Step 7: Blush

Like a shy and flustered doll with flushed apples, the most successful way of simulating blood rushing to the face with a fresh flush is blush — which is essentially adding back the colour you initially blanked out with foundation or concealer. Whether it is liquid, cream or a powder texture, buildable and blendable formulas that sit pretty on the face are perfect to avoid a rapid case of a clown face. Unless you’re going for that look in which case… then why are you here learning how to be naturally pretty artificially? We may not be achieving a clown style paint, but at least clowns know to cover what they actually look like. We want rosy cheeks but not your actual rosy cheeks, they need to be covered with correctly applied blush. Either apply near where you have contoured to complete the Neapolitan ice cream dream or on the apples for a youthful ‘of course I don’t drink on a Wednesday night, I start in the afternoon’ appearance. The ‘r’ in ‘rosy’ stands for rosacea!

Step 8: Brows

Beautiful babes have bushy brows. They are luscious, feathery yet structured. Excellent eyebrows help frame your potentially dull eyes and even duller soul. They must be bursting to the brim with full and fine hairs that are perfectly placed like a field of wheat gracefully bending to the whim of the wind. Sparse brows must be colored-in with hair-like strokes to achieve a defined yet contrastingly soft shape; otherwise, the wheat field fantasy can not be achieved.

The appearance of big brows are paramount but let’s not get carried away; if you have brows that grow beyond the desired shape or — heaven forbid — crawl into the unruly unibrow territory, then the werewolf must be tamed! We want brows with lots of hair but not so much so that people become aware that body hair exists on every body part and not just the pretty places. For your beauty to be proper, you must prickly pluck at putrid brows that may attempt to escape from the frame you wish to create. Herd in the hairs with tweezers and a spoolie. The ‘u’ in ‘unibrow’ stands for unkempt!

Step 9: Eyes

Like the wings of a raven, your lashes must rise to great lengths and take flight! Fluttery or spidery, your eyelashes must be big, black and bold. Use mascaras with suspiciously large and girthy wands, or adhere lashes with glue to the very sensitive eye area, for a sultry winged-out effect that make any bird jealous of the way you can flap your eyelids.

When it comes to eyeshadow and liner, nothing is more trendy than the fox eye; this is achieved by applying products close to the lash lines and smudged in an upward diagonal that mimics monolids, which are frequently mocked and ridiculed… It’s nothing to take seriously since it’s just a trend and just makeup. It’s not like it highlights the hypocrisy that eyes that slant upwards are only palatable and pretty to non-Asians on non-Asians. Neutral and brown tones are the most wearable to achieve this effect and smoke out. The ‘l’ in ‘liner’ stands for creative leeway!

Step 10: Lips

And now the final step is lips! So, sometimes it is unfortunate to be peasant poor and not have the resources to afford filler for two plush petals for lips, so we’ll settle for lip liner and plumping glosses that burn at chapped lips and cracked self-esteem. For the most realistic appearance of bigger lips, use lip products that are in the nude family. Make sure to get into the corners of the lip and overline the outer rim of your lips to make your pout protrude like a puckering duckbill. When it comes to lips they need to be obviously enlarged; how are people going to kiss you if they can’t even use Google Maps to track the location of your tiny mouth? Overlining your lips and topping it off with a shellac layer of gloss is equivalent to the ending sentiments of a holistic ritual; the closer you are to a blow-up doll, the closer to God. The ‘f' in 'full' stands for filler!

And that is the final look. I think it went pretty well; we had some moments where I wasn’t sure where it was going but all-in-all it went pretty well and I REALLY like the final outcome — you’re less ugly! When following this tutorial, you successfully erase any trace of your factual facial features and transform into a beautiful person. You can temporarily fantasize that you are not ugly until the magic disappears with makeup removal. Don’t forget to share this with your friends, family, enemies and dogs (the latter two synonymous and interchangeable) so they too can learn some handy tips because I don’t need to look at them to know they need one or… all things changed about them so they’re actually pretty.

If you were following along (like you should have been) please post it on Instagram or Twitter and tag me with the hashtag #NoUglyIn10 so I see all your wonderful recreations. Of course, it won’t truly fulfil the empty cavern of shallow validation the same way dimethicone can fill your pores, but you should have taken a good few hours and card transactions to give it your best try. Thank you again SO MUCH for watching remember to follow me on all my social media and I shall see you in the next tutorial. The ‘b’ in ‘beauty’ stands for byeeeee!

Cover Photo Source: The Mitten Kitten Blog