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.