The social un-pressure that will undermine your body goals this summer
Summer has just started and for the first time I’m ready to welcome it with a summer-compliant body to show off. After years of trial and errors, I have devised the right strategy to finally get that summer look I had always longed for.
Photo by Aphiwat Chuang
One of the main measures that made me achieve a summer-compliant body is drinking daily 1 L of draining tisane. I have finally found a draining tisane that fights against liquid retention without leaving me catatonic in bed. All the other ones I tried over the past years, together with the nasty liquids around your hips, expelled the mineral salts that keep your body functioning too. If you can’t function, you can’t get out of your house showing off that in fact you have no liquid retention on your legs. And the hard truth of the world we live in is that if you can’t show something, then it doesn’t exist. Given that this is the first summer I can go out of my house without fainting, I can proudly declare that I have defeated liquid retention.
Photo by Joanna Kosinka
Another milestone that I have recently achieved is that I have recovered from the hair loss I experienced three years ago. And having thick and healthy hair is of course a major feature of the summer-compliant body. Back then, I was re-engineering my life to reduce my plastic intake as much as I could. I had found in an expensive and hipster supermarket a solid shampoo that not only was package-free, but that was also advertised to be vegan (I mean, probably hipsters thought that regular shampoos contain pork fat), consciously hand-made by little girls somewhere where there is still war (were the hipsters supporting child labour in the name of ecology?) and with the added value of making you feel morally superior. With just one wash, my hair became frizzy, opaque and weak and some of it felt… And it took three years of supplements for hair growth costing 35 Euro per month to recover from that fatal 12 Euro soap bar to get back my thick and shiny hair, which is now ready again to be gently moved by the summer breeze.
Speaking of hair, another big part of the summer-compliant body is shaving. I have successfully defeated the other type of hair: the body hairs you don’t want. I have finally discovered that the crystal deodorant stone I normally use works wonders also to prevent redness after shaving. Shaving my underarms has always caused redness to my skin and it was not something I could do on a daily basis. This meant that during summertime sometimes I had to wear T-shirts even on extremely hot days. Thanks to the crystal deodorant stone, I can now wear tops, tank tops and crop tops as often as I want without having to choose between showing my hairs or my dermatitis to the world. On the same wavelength, I have established a successful practice of dry brushing that prevents ingrown hairs from killing the summer vibes around my bikini line.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska
Considering all the achievements above, my claim is that me and my body are finally ready to face summer. The first thing I did after coming out as summer compliant was to go on social media, follow back again the channels about beauty, health and style I stopped following at a time of deep frustration to arrogantly put an imaginary “tick” on all their useless pieces of advice and tricks to get ready for summer that never worked for me. I was already enjoying the moment when I could scream against my screen: “I have it all this year, you idiots!”… and, instead, I realized that even this year I did not have a summer-compliant body.
To my surprise, what these feeds were telling me was that the summer-compliant body was to be found in the opposite direction with respect to all the efforts I had been making. I scrolled down on these pictures and videos of women proudly showing off their cellulite and their bikini lines full of disgusting ingrown hairs. Some of them had their hair half shaved and bragged about how they fought the patriarchy by letting their underarm hairs grow and joyfully jumped up and down across the room to celebrate that. And even more so, the comments below these feeds were positively welcoming this new aesthetics of the summer-compliant body. The people posting comments seemed to genuinely think that what they just saw was truly beautiful. I was shocked. I felt frustrated. Stupid. Betrayed. Sad and deeply exhausted for having worked hard for years for nothing. Again.
Photo by Artem Bellaikin
Despite my competitive and achievement-oriented personality, I did not act on that and decided not to embark on this race towards this new aesthetics. There were several reasons behind this choice. First of all, I didn’t want to go back to fainting again. Second of all, the new standard of how a summer-compliant body should look like just did not resonate with me: I didn’t find its features to be beautiful at all. Somehow, it did not feel like a standard to me and seemed, rather, a fishy “un-standard”. Yes, there have been pretty destructive beauty standards throughout history that people should distance from (hello, heroine chic!) and yes, beauty standards change over time and may contradict each other in a stupid way. However, my point is that, normally, a standard is something people “strive for” and, instead, this time around, having this new summer-compliant body is the default setting for everyone. I agree that the pressure of being beautiful (accordingly to the fashionable notion of beauty) has been harsh on people and caused damage, especially on women. But I also wonder whether this “un-pressured” aesthetics will be truly regarded one day as beautiful and desirable by people (including myself) or if, instead, this is just another aggregation of lies that will make us feel good and relieved in the short-term, but that may cause even greater frustration in the long-run.
For now, the only thing left for me to do this summer is to set aside the grief and disappointment and to still proudly show up at the beach even with my immaculate bikini line, trusting that, after all, beauty is inside.
Breaking Thirty Quote
Now I would love to hear from you! What do you think of this new attitude on social media that advocates for acceptance and body positivity but that also praises unhealthy body standards? Do you believe that what you see is truly beautiful or do you feel you have been told a lie instead? Let me know in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe to the Breaking Thirty Newsletter for more juicy content like this one.