Your Glow-Up, Your Rules: Redefining Beauty with Confidence

That’s literally every glow-up tiktok in a nutshell.

Mainstream glow-up culture is messy. It’s expensive, extreme, quick, unrealistic and superficial.

You are here, reading this, because the universe is on your side. The world wants you to become your highest-self. This is a sign that you are on track to becoming a glowing goddess. Because glowing goddesses are educated, continually improving both physically and mentally and are intentional with their time.

A quick goddess’-eye view

With your time in mind, here’s a quick goddess’-eye view (aka bird’s-eye view) of this article:

1. For those of you who don’t know what in the world a glow-up is…start the article from the first heading—some Urban Dictionary quotes will not fail to amuse you!
2. Don’t let brands and consumerism capitalise on your insecurities—it’s honestly a crime because you’ll read to realise how obsessed people are with splurging on glow-ups
3. Quick and extreme glow-ups are not successful, sustainable or healthy (unlike what mainstream media portrays)
4. If you want to TRULY and EFFECTIVELY glow-up and become a better version of you, read until the end—because the less than five minutes you’ll spend reading this is going to help you 1000 times more than the amount of time you spend on social media.

Hold on…I just want to make it clear that I’m not hating on glow-ups. I’m supportive of glow-ups depending on your purpose (they should be glowing goddess goals and nothing less!) and your way of making it a reality. With that out of the way, let’s unveil glow-up culture’s problematic obsessions and break free from those toxic traps to find successful, sustainable and healthy ways to glow-up on our own terms.

What in the world is a glow-up?

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Here’s what the Urban Dictionary has to say:

• “Glow up means when someone who was ugly are ugly will get cute” (what the heck was with that grammar? 😂🤦‍♀️)
• “To go from the bottom to the top to the point of disbelief [for example] Wow she really did glow up. From ugly duckling to gorgeous swan!!”

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Basically, a glow-up is a process in which society thinks you become more attractive. It’s in shows like The Princess Diaries (okay, but Anne Hathaway/Mia was conventionally attractive even before her makeover). And, it’s all over social media seen with celebrities (like Bella Hadid, Kylie Jenner and Blackpink’s Lisa) and influencers. (Not saying that artificial glow-ups are bad as braces and facials fall in that category, but celebrity transformations are expensive on a whole other dimension!)

Bringing us to the topic of how…

WE’RE OBSESSED WITH SPLURGING 🤑

Social media is slapping a price tag on these extreme glow-ups. You see girls splurging hundreds, thousands and tens of thousand on that five hour haircut, that designer dress and those claws.

LISTEN UP: this isn’t to say I’m against spending money on yourself. I actually believe it’s important to invest in yourself. But, glow-up culture has transformed into an unbelievably profitable market. A marketing genius’ sole purpose is to turn people’s insecurities into cash. Money may not grow on trees, but it does grow on insecurities.

WE’RE OBSESSED WITH THE QUICK AND EXTREME

Glow-up culture on TikTok looks like this: the “before” is portrayed as needing to be “fixed”, unloved and unaccepted versus the “after” where they’re confident, transformed and “good enough”.

We all have our good, bad and just plain normal days—and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re always focused on your imperfections, you’ll always find them.

“What you focus on, grows.”

paraphrasing my old psychology teacher who used to pause mid-class at the tiniest disturbance lol

(Be prepared for some tough love in this paragraph.) You feel you need to glow-up to be “accepted” by others more? You can’t even accept yourself because you’re always focused on how you’re “not good enough”. As I said before, if you think like this, your mind is not going to be able to accept yourself even after you’re “glowed-up” because there will always be another negative thought about yourself. You’ll just become another person with insecurities hidden under your shirt with a glowed-up facade.

Honestly, glowing-up mainstream media mode (if that’s not a thing, I’m coining it), is like (or may even involve) going on a fad diet. It isn’t sustainable so it doesn’t last, leaving you yo-yoing between the “before” and “after”, “before” and “after”…IT GOES NOWHERE! IT’S A WASTE OF TIME!! (I may or may not be talking from experience…)

Glow-up culture is obsessed with extreme makeovers because apparently the greater the difference between the “before” and “after”, the more “successful” the glow-up is deemed. Completely throwing the ideas of sustainable self-development and the power of the marginal 1% gains (more on this in the near future—join the newsletter T-3-2-1…LIFTOFF to be on top of new glowing godess reads, inspo, journal prompts and tea) out of the window.

Here are some glow-up culture myths:

• That you can go from insecure to confident overnight solely due to a physical glow-up.
• That real growth is easy and quick.
• That you need to glow-up after a break-up.
• That you need to glow up for someone else.
• That you need to glow up for summer.

All for validation.

Glowing-up is not a sprint, it’s a life-long marathon where we strive to improve our lives one step at a time.

WE’RE OBSESSED WITH APPEARANCES (ONLY)

How many times in glow-up culture, pop culture and on social media have you seen content that correlates one’s size and weight with their happiness and health? I know—it’s bad.

Chasing after mainstream beauty standards is impossible because the finish line keeps on changing and extending. Beauty standards aren’t fixed for eternity, compare Audrey Hepburn to Kim Kardashian for example. So if your self-acceptance is tied to how your external appearance fits in with society (instead of your mindset)—it’s not self-love—it’s just insecurity in a different dress.

Which is why we need to…

Redefine “glow-up”

Throughout this article I’ve said the words “mainstream media” a bit too much. So I want to propose something new. I call it gentle-stream media (read my about page). In gentle-stream media, glowing-up is more importantly an internal journey. (By the way, you can relax in lavieenroseemily.com because everything in my digital secret garden is gentle-stream media.)

Also, can we just pause for a sec and think about why you want to glow-up?

Why do you want to glow-up?

Take your time, journal, shadow-work (an article on this is also coming soon, in the meantime, join T-3-2-1…LIFTOFF to use La Vie En Rose 💜 Emily journal prompts every Monday morning as part of your motivating morning routine).

Do this: treat yourself like how you’d treat your own child (just imagine it if you need to like me). Here’s another journal prompt:

If you treated yourself like your own child, what would you do that you’re not doing right now? And why?

If you treated yourself like your own child, wouldn’t you give yourself unconditional love—during the good, bad and normal?

Self-love is a key ingredient to a true glow-up because self-love gives you power. It gives you your power to glow-up on your own terms and not anyone else’s.

Now, let’s not forget that glow-ups are not limited to just physical ones, there are (just to name a few):

• mental glow-ups
• career glow-ups
• personality glow-ups

(If you want me to write another article delving more into one of those glow-ups, I’d love it if you’d drop a comment 😊—I’ll write one if a lot of you want one.)

I do want to touch a little more on that last one—personality glow-ups. People are going to remember how you made them feel for longer than they will remember whether or not you had a pimple on your nose or even your name.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

If you take one thing away from what you’ve just read, it should be to try a mental or personality glow-up before a physical one. You’ll probably find that you no longer “need” that physical glow-up.

Redefine your glow-up with your terms.

If you haven’t heard this for a while—or you don’t realise it yet—let me tell you this…

You are enough.

Trust me.

love,

emily