Lizzo Posts Her Unedited Nude Photo To Encourage Women To Own Up Their Body On Social Media. What An Empowering Move!
Smoothening the skin texture or removing those eye bags before posting a selfie on social media is so tempting and I would be lying if I said I never did it. In fact, if I am being completely honest, I contemplate using filters to correct minor imperfections every time I put up a post. It’s basically routine now. Although I don’t take selfies with those really phony and unrealistic filters which make your lips look fuller or add “natural” flush on your cheeks, I do rework the uneven skin tone with photo effects and specifically post photos in which I look a bit taller and leaner. I am sure I am not alone and a lot of women do alter their appearance to some extent in their social media pictures. Celebrities do it too. And some of them are brave enough to admit it to their followers.
American singer Lizzo is someone who is candid, real and body confident. She is the queen of self love and her Instagram feed is proof of that. However, she has confessed to feeling insecure about what society thought were her flaws in the past. She said in an interaction, “I was following people before who I thought were beautiful and they were society’s beauty standard. Looking at them made me have this desire to edit or to change or think that I wasn’t worthy. I don’t want one person’s beauty to diminish the other.” She now owns up to her cellulite, belly rolls and arm flab–the things she used to ‘fix’ in her photos before posting.
Lizzo is now comfortable in her skin and doesn’t feel the need to retouch her photos. She demonstrated amazing body confidence and made a statement about being real on social media by posting an unedited nude selfie on her Instagram account. She wrote in the caption, “To celebrate [Taurus season] I wanna give y’all this unedited selfie.. now normally I would fix my belly and smooth my skin but baby I wanted show u how I do it au natural.” She did it as a part of the #DoveSelfEsteemProject aims at undoing the negative impact of these beauty filters which perpetuate superficial beauty standards. “Let’s get real y’all,” she added.
Also Read: Instagram’s Censorship Of A Black Plus-Sized Model’s Photo Raises Concern. Do Its Policies Have A Racial Bias?
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When we were young, we didn’t have phones or the internet and thus were least bothered about our pictures as teenagers. Although we did obsess about how we looked, we didn’t even know what filters were or could do. However, young girls today start to fix their pictures and modify their appearance on social media in their preteen years. Lizzo said in the same interaction with the brand, “The scary thing about [it] is when I was their age, the girls now who are 12 or 13, I felt the same way. I remember waking up and wanting to be someone else, change my body, change my eye color, my hair texture, the shape of my body and the color of my skin. I didn’t have photo retouching or filters. It scares me to think that now there is a tool that actually cashes in on that insecurity and it makes it bigger. It feeds the monster,” she said.
The reason we feel the need to manipulate our photos is that we think of these imperfections as the worst things about ourselves that we don’t want the world to see. We have been fed a very particular idea of what’s beautiful and what’s not and we try to fit in those beauty standards with the help of filters and effects. How right is this, though? To constantly feel you should look better or a certain way? The photoshopped images of models and celebrities we come across on social media every day simply fuels these insecurities and add to the negative body image issues. If more celebrities like Lizzo start getting real about their not-so perfect skin and curvy or bloated body, it can help change the beauty ideals we have been prescribed since forever.
