Why skin is the forgotten frontier of the beauty acceptance movement

Wilde founded the successful skincare brand tbh, which often reposts images of customers on social media with their bare skin and blemishes. She attributes this to their very vocal base of Gen Z customers who she says are demanding greater representation from brands than generations before. “I think that it has really been a bottom-up movement where customers have demanded a more balanced and more realistic portrayal of beauty.”

The acceptance of different skin types, and the language around how we talk about skin, trails behind other movements, like body positivity. Beauty writer Jessica DeFino agrees, saying that skincare still has “a lot of catching up to do.” What’s missing, she says, is a challenge to the idea of “healthy skin” or “normal skin”. “The body positivity movement has benefited immensely from challenging the idea that fat equals unhealthy. The skincare space needs to have that same reckoning in order to move forward with a meaningful movement of acceptance.”

Onella Muralidharan won Bella Management’s Unsigned Model Competition in 2021. The 23-year-old curve model has vitiligo (a condition in which parts of the skin lack pigmentation), and says she never thought she would be a model. “I’m curvy, and I have a skin condition that is quite apparent. I didn’t really feel like I hit those beauty standards.”

While she says she never really struggled with accepting her vitiligo, she certainly faced judgment from the outside world. “When I worked in retail, customers would come up to me and ask, ‘What happened to you?’, ‘What’s on your face?’” She adds that the most ignorant comments have come from adults, rather than children. “Fully grown adults often feel like they’re entitled to an answer from people who look different.”

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The fashion industry is slowly changing, she says. She has featured in campaigns for beauty brand Mecca, appeared on morning show Studio 10, and walked in Australian Fashion Week. Makeup artists will consult her about what’s she comfortable with, and adapt their use of makeup to her needs. “I don’t want my different skin tones covered up,” says Muralidharan. “Mum put some foundation on me when I was about 7, and after that, I have never wanted to cover it up.”

For Muralidharan, the key to spreading acceptance for conditions like vitiligo is education about what it is and how to act considerately around others.

Visibility for a range of skin conditions is certainly growing. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Cara Delevigne and Cyndi Lauper have been open about living with psoriasis. Kendall Jenner has walked the red carpet with acne and Alicia Keys has forgone makeup altogether. This kind of visibility is important, says Smith, to “enhance public understanding, break barriers, minimise social stigmatisation, discrimination, and humiliation.”

It’s impossible, however, to consider the importance of these celebrity stories without accounting for the immense privilege they hold. They all fit a certain beauty ideal, and have a level of wealth that gives them access to top-of-the-line beauty products, treatments, and medicines.

“It’s much easier (and therefore less effective or revolutionary),” says Defino, “for celebrities and influencers who conform to traditional beauty standards in other ways – white, thin, pouty lips, wide eyes, youthful-looking – to reveal a perceived ‘flaw’ and still be considered beautiful.”

Rather than only slightly widening the goal posts to include a privileged few, we need create a world without any such goal posts at all.

Lifeline 13 11 14. Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636.

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