Guest post by Claire Nelson

Image: HERE

You know the deal. Your friends upload their photos from your latest get-together, and you eagerly start looking through them. But admit it - you are also scanning them to check how good (or bad) you look. We all do it. It’s part of our fascination with our appearance. Call it vanity, call in insecurity (and sometimes those two things are one and the same), we are fascinated with the way we look.

A familiar example: my absolutely gorgeous friend is a chronic Facebook-photo-untagger. Very few photos seem to get through her ruthless screening process. Not just those understandably unflattering photographs (there always seems to be one taken while you’re gurning mid-sentence), but perfectly nice, normal photos. I can see a great photo of my friend, and she will notice a squinty eye. (De-tag!)
Needless to say, my friend is one of a million women who do the same thing. Why do we do this to ourselves? And who exactly are we trying to hide our flaws from anyway?

Self-image is a complex thing. It’s less about how we actually look, and more about how we see ourselves; and this can be the whole problem. Our own worst critics, we will focus on aspects and areas of our appearance that nobody else even notices. Women can be almost blind to their best traits, such is the extreme focus on their so-called flaws. What we don’t often realise is that we see ourselves far less than anybody else, so our self-image is often obscured.

I have learned this lesson myself.  Last summer I was lucky enough to have my photo taken by the renowned photographer Rankin, for his exhibition of real people. Of course, I blindly overlooked the word “real” and decided that this was my opportunity to be captured looking gorgeous and glamorous, a la Kate Moss. I went in there with dreams of big hair and lots of make-up. 
However, the stylists went against the big hair –they left it as it was, and gave me minimal makeup. I was forced to go out there and be real.

I tried to compensate for my lack of makeover by trying to wrestle my best “look” into the lens of the camera. Yet the first set of shots didn’t look right... I was too stiff, too posed.  In the end Rankin chose one photo which really stood out. It was me laughing, and I had to agree it was the best photo of them all, even though my crooked overbite was prominent, and my large nose crinkled in glee. My two most sensitive hang-ups brought to life!
Getting my prints back, I felt a little pang of disappointment that I had not been transformed into an amazing version of myself, and that in fact, I just looked like.... me.  The real me. With my flaws right there for all to see.

Everybody else saw that it was a fabulous photo, and I realised that of course, this is how they see me all the time.  I may not be used to seeing myself from that angle, but everyone else was. They thought the photo was beautiful because I looked confident and happy.  This was a revelation to me.  My own view of myself was skewed, and not necessarily kind.

We all have our hang-ups. But what we ought to be doing, instead of focusing on them, is accepting them. They’re there. That’s us. That’s how we look. It can be such a liberating feeling to accept that, and realise that actually, we’re really attractive people. I’ve had my share of male admirers, and clearly they don’t see the nose and the teeth - they see me laughing, pulling faces, shaking that lovely hair of mine. In the same way friends and family liked my Rankin portrait because they’re used to the nose and the teeth, and when they see that photo they just see me.

I am hanging that photo on my wall so that I can learn to see me too, and so I can be reminded to see past my hang-ups. I will also keep tagging my gorgeous friend in our Facebook photos, in the hope that more of them stay that way. We all have a different image of ourselves in our heads to what everyone else sees, so we should try to see ourselves as others do. Let’s stop listening to the opinions of our own worst critic – after all, what do they know? They never see the whole picture.