Julia Grebenkina on perfectionism, shame and gloss

beauty - the word that most often appears on the covers of magazines and the concept with which we unconsciously measure everything around. Yourself first. At the same time, a single and unchanging idea of ​​beauty never existed - as our heroine Iris Apfel said, "in a society where there is one standard of beauty, something is wrong with culture." We talked with five people of completely different professions and looks, whose lifestyle or occupation is associated with a reflection on the beauty of the body, and also asked them to film for us in that degree of nakedness in which they feel comfortable. Our first heroine is Yulia Grebenkina, the former editor of Glamor and Allure, and now co-host of the beauty Insider blog, told how she learned to respond to negative reviews about herself, why you shouldn’t be angry at the whole world and where the line between beauty and health .

Beauty bloggers feel a lot of pressure: for some reason readers think that bloggers should be perfect, feel free to say so and leave tough and not always polite comments.

Yes, this is a standard story, but it seems to me that it is usual for the Internet as a whole. People believe that if you show yourself and expose yourself, they have the right to criticize you. And quite often they do it in an unpleasant form and do not even think at all that words can hurt. Recently, from my instagram, I learned that I have small eyes, thin lips and in general everything is bad.

When you receive a negative comment, the main thing is to understand whether you have met another troll or indeed there is some space for your development. A story known in beauty bloggers when I published photos of a manicure with a cuticle cut to blood showed that I have room to grow: I need to take better pictures and think about every detail in the picture.

In the comments to the post was a bunch of negativity. Have you digested this for a long time?

I have been online for quite some time, at the beginning of my career I was the administrator of the forum glamour.ru, so I always calmly treated this, although I didn’t show myself anywhere in the blog. When you and your appearance are discussed, at the first moment you feel a wave of shame. This year I read the Brene Brown book, The Gifts of Imperfection, about shame and perfectionism and understood this mechanism. More than anything, we are afraid to show the world our imperfections and the fact that we are vulnerable. To cope with the shame that arises after negative comments, you just need to talk about it with someone. Separate yourself from what is being discussed. The photo - well, yes, it is yours, but it's still a picture, not you. And people can condemn it simply because they have a bad day. If you were not there, they still would not be satisfied and they would be annoyed by someone else.

I love one thought from Stephen Covey's book “The 7 Skills of Highly Effective People”: there is a space between a certain irritant and our reaction to decide how to behave. You can be offended and hate everyone or think about how to improve yourself. I realized that as a blogger I need to pay more attention to small details. This is what the gloss is built on: everything is in perfectionism, every detail is important in the frame. And we (with Jana Zubtsova, co-author of Beauty Insider. - Approx. Ed.) In a blog quite often deal with photos.

But not only gloss is to blame for the perfectionist attitude to appearance. People themselves do not want to see something imperfect, they believe that bloggers of their audience all the time have something, first of all - a beautiful picture. It upsets me - when the beauty blogosphere in Russia was born, its main difference from emasculated gloss was life: cosmetics as it is, people as they are. Four years later nobody needs it. Now all the top bloggers masterpieces on a DSLR, but it’s impossible to understand from them how the shade of varnish will look on you. In general, nail_ru is only for inspiration to walk - pure gloss.

One of the most popular posts I had a text about cosmetic laziness, which remains my life concept

Do you think people have become more tolerant of not perfect, in terms of gloss, appearance?

I do not think. This is clearly seen in any article about acne or the blog of the same Cassandra Bankson. People think that you have acne because of a wrong lifestyle, that your parents are the ones to blame for acne, and you need to "just check your stomach." They do not even think that if a person has problem skin, he tried everything in the world before daring to show himself to people, as Cassandra did in a video with 22 million views.

Did the blog somehow influence the perception of one's own appearance?

I do not know if this is a blog, but at thirty I feel much more confident, more beautiful and better than before the blog. About two years ago I began to take off a lot, and this greatly influenced my self-perception. People show you how you can change, and you realize that you can turn into a beautiful woman, if you really need to, but also so good. And it warms self-esteem.

Nevertheless, I remain a great nihilist (this is obvious to regular readers). One of the most popular posts I had was a text about cosmetic laziness, which remains my life concept. For me, there are two types of questions. If you lose your hair, problem skin, or a lot of really overweight, these are health issues, not beauty. And beauty is some kind of cute things that do not change life, but make it a little nicer.

You said that now you are more in tune with yourself than a few years ago. Did you have any complexes and you got rid of them? What contributed to this?

I have been a man-complex since childhood. Firstly, because of the thinness - the size of the XS just seems so beautiful. When I weighed 42 kilograms, I was a walking skeleton, even buying clothes was extremely difficult. At 25, I gained a few kilograms, now I have a normal size, and this greatly increased my self-esteem. The second point, which changed everything - I found a suitable bra and have been buying it for 15 years. I have a deformed rib cage: a bone protrudes on the chest, this is visible under clothing and without a bra looks strange. The third is that I worked in gloss and saw how the shooting was done: layers of tonal, which are retouched into perfect skin, things are stabbed from behind to sit as it should. After you see all this, you understand that there is simply no such ideal picture in life, but you are here and now. And you - the way you are - are quite good for yourself.

To show how the characters see themselves, we asked them to make a self-portrait

The photo: Julia Grebenkina