It's time to turn the camera outwards

Your face looks the same as it did five minutes ago

My mum has a magnifying mirror. Previously my routine when visiting was to get the pleasantries out of the way so I could head upstairs and enjoy five minutes of being horrified by my face. When it broke, not at the hands of my reflection, I was thrilled she asked me to replace it come Christmas. Not visiting that mirror has required self control, the kind of restraint we find when tempted to post a photo of us online because a certain someone is watching and we want them to pass away painfully from regret.

When I look at my mum she is the most beautiful woman in the world. Sounds cliche but through my gaze, she is. Through the magnifying mirror? Probably not. Mum if you’re reading this I’m joking. Rest assured no matter what you see in a x20 reflection, you’re not going to like it. If someone is that close to your face? They’ve probably fallen for your personality by now.

This morning I found myself on TikTok. I rarely use social media in a personal sense after having a horrifying realisation I would spend my life watching other people recording their lives and it would turn out none of us were actually living, just performing out our own existence or consuming someone else’s. A close second horrifying realisation was spending my life sat in front of a magnification mirror.

Social media is a rather large part of my day job and here I was. TikTok a steaming, freshly baked Cornish scone and me a Labrador summoning at will from the kitchen counter. I devoured content without breath, not knowing what I was consuming or who. Munch munch.

My first observation after 600 scrolls was that my thumb hurt. A friend once told me she was surprised she didn't have bigger arm muscles the amount of cigarettes she lifted. I’ve not seen her since TikTok’s inception but I must remember to ask if her thumb muscle has also strengthened. The second was that I’d ended up on a QVC channel but instead of selling me a facial hair remover, they were selling me forty toilet rolls for four pence. The former would be more useful right now. My scroll stopping moment was stumbling across an ‘instagram faced’ woman, staring directly into the camera at herself while lip syncing a song (marginally better than Katie Perry but still not adequate). She stepped back, flicked her hair, did an ‘omg me? No way’ smile and it was all over. I can be 95% certain she didn’t want to show off her lip syncing, but I reserve the 5% incase she views her performance the same way a certain Australian break dancer does.

She was beautiful and looked the way we are all told to look which is basically the same. But this video made me feel uncomfortable. I saw myself in her. In all the selfies and videos I’d ever taken and posted online. Of all the times I was pretending it was about something else, but it was actually just about my face. I had a true, ‘what on earth are we doing?’ moment. I’ve been having them a lot. Ultra processed foods, read receipts, AI’s carbon emissions and adverts about toilet air fresheners. That kind of thing, you know? Of course she can do what she likes, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we’ve actually thought about what we’re doing and why, when it comes to our camera roll being clogged with, well, ourselves?

Alas, TikTok users flocked to the comments. Showers of praise fell to her feet that once may have taken the shape of fresh fruit and frankincense. Everyone was calling her Blair Waldorf. She looked a bit like her - it’s true. But the Blair I knew would be scheming somewhere. Uncovering corrupt business people or double handed texting.

Every ‘good’ selfie I have ever taken has been shared on social media. I am not separate from any face filming. I felt good, sometimes didn’t, snapped fifty identical photos, painstakingly chose three, edited them and put it somewhere for the world to see. The only time I’d see them again would be looking back in ten years, wishing I could still look like that, even though I wasn’t satisfied at the time. Was I taking it to file in an album to look back on? No. Is there anything more horrifying than when your iPhone creates a ‘memory video’ of the 5th November 2023 and it’s just you and an avo toast? Maybe not.

There was a time in the name of ‘self love’ I convinced myself everything I did was for me. I wore makeup solely for me. Smiled and nodded at my hairdresser when he said ‘does that feel okay?’ as peroxide burned into my scalp for me. We have now convinced women that any procedure, medical, cosmetic or life threatening is just for us. Love yourself, fill your face, get a BBL. I always like to ask myself the question, who benefits from this? When I see something being advertised, trending or a movement online. It’s sold for ‘our benefit’ and sure, some things we do for us. But more often (in my case) it’s for someone else to not think I’m a gremlin.

Paris Hilton once said she invented the selfie, it’s a shame Cornelius, born in 1839 isn’t here to dispute this.

There is nothing wrong with doing things for other people. That might be what being a human is all about. TikTok therapy talks about ending ‘people pleasing’ and ‘your happiness matters above everything and everyone else’ and that can be helpful, but only to a point. Aren’t we suppose to please other people? To make our neighbours smile or some chutney? Or like me still not be sure of their names and now it’s too late to ask. You should listen to your sister talk about her ex from six years ago even though it doesn’t make you happy, because it makes you a sister. Nothing else. Not everything has to benefit us. This idea of only doing things for number one enforces us to slowly become more individual in an already individualistic society. One that is making us sick. All of that to say, I do not wax for me. I wax for the person whose leg I will brush up against at night and I am okay with that.

But Blair’s hair flick kept hitting the inside of my skull and I eventually realised that never in history have we had 24/7 access to viewing our own face. I could flip my camera around right now and view myself in bed - well, not right now because I dropped my phone in the bath earlier but before then. We are giving umpteen opportunities to stare at our physical selves and maybe we’re just not built for that. Can constant awareness of our appearance be beneficial when you have to be rich to look the way others do online?

I could use the camera on my laptop. Walk past one of my three mirrors. Attempt to catch a glimpse of myself in every shop window. Stare into a spoon. There must be thousands of pictures of myself on my phone. I’ve missed canopies because I couldn't get a good picture of my face. On what planet is a selfie more important than a smoked salmon Bellini? This planet - and what is that all about?

There is so much talk about turning inwards but I have found the happiest moments of my life have been looking outwards. Engaging with others, tasting life instead of tugging at my face in the mirror. So much focus on ourselves, healing, dealing, creaming (skin care) and applying but despite it all, the majority of us feel like a Victoria sponge that failed to rise.

After deleting my personal instagram (it was not easy, I toyed with it for a year and genuinely thought my life might end) something surprising happened.

Yes I became a little less anxious, my screen time is down to around two hours and it was much more pleasant to not be aware the rest of the world was having a ‘better time’ than me. The unexpected side effect was that I stopped staring at myself so much through my phone camera, and then the mirror.

The need to daily selfie dissipated because, who were they for? Where would I put them? I have taken the same amount of photos the last five months than I would have in a week.

When I told a friend I’d stopped spending so much time staring at myself in the mirror she looked at me with pity pouring from her eyes. As if maybe I’d grown not to like who I was again. I was rejecting myself because it’s contradictory to the self love advice we see online, but it’s not that. I want to see the world beyond myself. To step out from the centre of my own universe from time to time. Go for a run without telling someone. Enjoy golden hour without thinking about it being the best light of the day to freeze my face in time.

I’m not talking about extremes. We don’t have to be separate from society, tech free, nursing a sourdough starter and never getting our eyebrows tinted. Nor do we need to take a thousand photo’s of ourselves but if you want to, snap away. We can admire ourselves in the mirror, occasionally feel frightened by what we see and take a mirror photo in a bathroom even though the more I think on that it feels strange to me? But when our face and appearance sits front and centre constantly, and the urge to check or adjust is so strong we gravitate toward mirrors, we have to wonder ‘what would I be looking at right now if I wasn’t looking at myself?’

I suffered with acne since the 1800s. It improved slightly when I stopped drinking so much red wine and left a bad relationship. In January 2024 I decided to stop using skin care products and makeup. Don’t they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results? No skincare product I have ever owned or had been prescribed worked and I was done. Celebrities kept bringing out skincare lines but we all know they don’t look like that because of a day cream. So, I decided to save my money to travel instead. I washed my face with a flannel and water and I still do, which makes me sound like I do come from the 1800’s. The first two months I looked like my liver had officially given up, but I think I just I couldn’t remember what my skin truly looked like without make up and perfect lighting (at least for a long period of time). My face was now further from an ‘instagram face’ than ever before and it was hard. At the beginning I could see every pore and imperfection. I would leave my desk at twenty minute intervals to inspect the imperfect work God had put his hand too. There was nothing to be done, only time. I threw a blanket over the giant mirror beside my desk and banned myself from my mum’s magnifying mirror and opted to spend time with my family instead.

After leaving my skin well alone and not inspecting it 24/7, it healed. I wear makeup sometimes now (it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, even if this modern world tells you otherwise) and it feels good to not attempt to hide underneath it and furiously check it is still on in my phone camera.

The less I’ve looked at my face the happier I have been. The less photos I’ve taken of myself, the more content I feel. Not taking eighty identical pictures of my face, with slightly different angles, in front of a window, when I was supposed to be somewhere ten minutes ago, has made my life better. I think about myself a little bit less now, and stay well away from magnifying mirrors.

K x