If I had a dollar for every time someone comments “you’re flawless” on one of Kendall Jenner/Shay Mitchell/Selena Gomez’s Instagram selflies, I’d be able to afford a Birkin. Okay, so the comment is usually “your flawless,” but that’s a subject for another time.
Sometimes it’s difficult to look at a picture of one of these gleaming girls and not think about the idea of perfection. Sure, some rational part of you knows that even these women must have had a pimple or stray brow hair or even a dimple of cellulite at some point – but it’s hard to hold on to that knowledge when a photo of one of these women, airbrushed and photoshopped and filtered, is all you can see.
This whole “flawless” trend kind of bothers me. I mean, admittedly, I throw around “I woke up like dis” jokes as often as the next girl does, and I respect what Beyonce was trying to do when she released the song “Flawless.” It was more about self-acceptance than the pursuit of perfection. But when that term gets applied to the women we all wish we could look like, it starts to get a little bit dangerous.
First of all, we have all have flaws and the bulk of those flaws aren’t physical. When we say someone is “flawless” based on a two-dimensional image, we’re just ignoring everything else, we’re saying the rest of it doesn’t matter. We’re essentially turning that person into something two-dimensional. Since this trend seems to be applied to women almost exclusively, we’re bringing up ideas about feminism and the woman’s place/function in this world by doing this. Maybe the solution is to change “you are flawless” to “you look flawless.” I don’t know.
The whole concept of calling someone flawless is probably doing wonders for the beauty industry’s profitability – or, more alarmingly, the plastic surgery industry’s – but what it’s doing to our already ridiculous standards of beauty isn’t so great. We look at a picture of some gorgeous starlet, we see that 20 other girls have called her “flawless” and we start to believe that we need to look like her too.
Troian Bellisario, aka Spencer Hastings on Pretty Little Liars, a woman who is seriously insightful about this very subject said it best. “This industry seems to invest more in perfection than in flaw,” she said in an Instagram comment. “But flaw and individuality, to me, are what make a human being interesting, they make out stories worth telling.”
There isn’t much I can do about the fact that magazines smooth the shit out of every body they photograph; it’s something I’ve sort of accepted as the status quo. But I can take a second or two to remind you that no one is flawless – not even the spectacular Kendall Jenner – and to drive home the point that to be without flaws should not be the goal.
Why We Need To Stop Calling People #Flawless
