This text accommodates references to consuming issues.
Welcome to Physique Speak, our new month-to-month column written by journalist, writer, and GLAMOUR‘s Web site Director, Ali Pantony. Ali has written extensively about her personal journey with physique acceptance and consuming issues for GLAMOUR, however nonetheless feels there’s a lot to be mentioned on this subject. Regardless of the thousands and thousands of #bodypositive TikToks, the societal pressures we face as girls have by no means actually gone away. In her month-to-month column, Ali explores the journey to accepting our our bodies in a society that has all the time taught us in any other case.
Earlier than the shut of 2022, I hadn’t heard of buccal fats. You in all probability hadn’t both. However instantly, buccal fats was all over the place – besides in our faces as a result of everybody, together with celebrities equivalent to Lea Michele and Chrissy Teigen, was having it eliminated.
For the blissfully uninitiated, buccal fats is the title given to the pads of fats tucked between the muscular tissues in your cheeks that sit beneath your cheekbones. These with surplus fats within the buccal area have extra rounded faces. Those who have it surgically eliminated – particularly ‘sucked out’ through an incision in your mouth when you’re nonetheless awake, in case you have been questioning (apologies when you weren’t) – are promised a extra chiselled, sculpted face.
I might make the painfully boring remark that that is ~one more~ factor for girls to agonise over (how we lengthy for the times when that mirror scene in Imply Ladies didn’t appear so ludicrous) however reality be instructed, I’ve all the time been insecure about my buccal fats. I simply didn’t know what it was known as.
Rising up, I’d obsess over my spherical face. I’d stand within the mirror and pinch and pull at my cheeks, baulking on the dimension of the chunk of flesh squeezed between my forefinger and thumb. I’d take a look at pictures from nights out and really feel my coronary heart plummet into my abdomen after I noticed the dimensions of my spherical face. ‘Notice to self,’ I’d assume, ‘Don’t smile like such a gormless fuckwit subsequent time, and perhaps your face received’t look so fats.’ Cue a tonne of toe-curlingly embarrassing MySpace-style poses, lips pursed into a good pout, desperately making an attempt to turf out the cheekbones I knew have been there someplace.
As a journalist writing about my – and many ladies’s – deepest insecurities on a month-to-month foundation, I’m conscious that this type of discuss can sound overly maudlin and self-pitying. So, reader, please don’t pity me. As a result of come 2015, I found the antidote to the repulsion of my buccal fats – or, again then, the extra euphemistically endearing ‘chubby chipmunk cheeks’. Contour! Wonderful contour!
The contouring increase of the mid-2010s helped to quieten the internalised fatphobia of an entire era of ladies trying to sculpt their faces, outline their jawline, and even disguise a double chin. We thought bronzer was our aesthetician. Profit Hoola was our scalpel. Hundreds of thousands of us Googled, ‘Find out how to contour like Kim Kardashian’. The sweetness business capitalised on our collective longing to slim our faces and types churned out new contour kits nearly as usually as we posted footage to Instagram utilizing the Clarendon filter.
Making use of bronzer beneath my cheekbones, alongside my jawline and throughout my brow earlier than mixing (badly) turned a part of my on a regular basis make-up routine. Nearly 10 years later, I’m considerably embarrassed to say it nonetheless is. Despite the fact that I write a column about physique acceptance, my internalised fatphobia signifies that I nonetheless attempt to slim my face with bronzer on daily basis.
