As I pushed my 40-year-old skin up my face in the mirror, to see if I would look better with it stretched across my cheekbones, past my ears … I suddenly shuddered and uttered to myself: “You have got to get out of here.”
After a decade in Los Angeles, I find myself sneaking back home to London more often than ever before. It’s beyond a call home … I’m on the run.
I’m escaping the mothership of insecurity. It’s just not good for me. I am yet to be convinced its good for anyone. Especially now. We are fast approaching what I am hoping is the ceiling of beauty standards: teenage body, but with the breasts and buttocks of a woman; hairless from below the eyebrows; Asian-shaped eyes, but Caucasian eye colours; Eastern European cheekbones; a button nose, filed down so much you look like a hot Voldemort; African lips; Indian hair and Korean skin. Skin cannot be too light or too dark, and no signs of gravity or time can show, however long you have been alive.
No pores. No scars. No smile lines. A small labia, but not too small — they’re now bringing in filler for the labia, to make sure it’s “puffy”. Let us not even get started on the strict standards imposed upon your anus.
Thankfully, for a mere few hundred thousand pounds, countless hours, pain, discomfort and some significant risk — with a chance of a quick and painful death — you can have all of that! And then perhaps you will finally be enough?
A friend of mine almost bled to death on a surgeon’s table in Turkey trying to meet these standards. And for what? For whom? For ourselves? Come off it. I’m too old. You shall have to pull the other one. Lockdown showed us what we would look like if the world wasn’t watching. It was more Chucky than Barbie.
In LA, you can scarcely tell anyone apart anymore. Being unique is not a priority
It would be dishonest if I were to position the UK as impenetrable to such standards. I can see the insidious rise of the pressure among my friends. Filler, Botox, weight-loss injections and whispers of facelifts have touched down on our little island. We are dipping our manicured toes in the quicksand. However, it is not as hyper-normalised here to conform to a monolithic beauty standard. In LA, you can scarcely tell anyone apart anymore. Being unique is not a priority. The goal is to win the race towards the uniform face and body set for everyone to attain. Obedience rebranded as “discipline”.
Thankfully, disobedience is in our culture, our history and ultimately in our marrow on this side of the pond. We have messy, dirty hair, yellow teeth, cracked lips, experimental style and we are not very good at applying heavy make-up. We don’t have a lot of patience for shapewear — we hardly can be arsed to put on a bra. We don’t know what the correct jeans size or fit is. We refuse to settle on a collective era of style. My favourite thing to consider when I walk through our parks and streets is what era an alien would think we were in, just by looking at us. In London, you can never tell. It is key here, to try to do your own thing.
Our national treasures are Emma Thompson, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet and Joanna Lumley. We are not possessed with the same obsession with youth over here. We see value in a life lived, in wisdom gained. In the confidence to wear time on your face with pride that somehow, in spite of being a woman on this Earth, you are still … alive! Lips are not ludicrously pumped, faces are seldom completely frozen. Our actors emote on our screens. They don’t look like emojis. They can cry, wail and screw up their nose to deliver a rowdy, snarling “f*** off”. We aren’t subjected to that foul Hollywood blur under the eyes of our middle-aged actresses. It never looks natural, and seldom manages to move well with the face. We never use said blur for men.
When a young Phoebe Waller-Bridge kissed a naturally ageing, post-menopausal Kristin Scott Thomas in Fleabag, nobody here winced, or vomited. It made no headlines. We all thought it was hot, and thoroughly understandable. (I remain disappointed we were never gifted that love story.) Hollywood, however, can tolerate, or even celebrate, a 17-year-old Scarlett Johansson kissing a middle-aged Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, but had it been Timothée Chalamet kissing Kathy Bates, the National Guard would have been deployed. It’s all so peculiar.
England is uncomfortable. It’s sweaty and freezing and wet and so, so dry at the same time. You are never wearing the right amount of clothes. Spending time on your hair is like taunting the devil to send you rain, wind and fire throughout your morning commute. You will inevitably always look like Mick Hucknall by the time you get to work.
We sleep with our make-up on, because we stay up living too late. We still don’t floss. Be honest. You don’t floss. Almost none of us have figured out what toner actually does. Our skin is always dry. We don’t drink enough water. We are tired. Fun or staying in bed until 4pm on a Saturday is our self care. We would rather spend our money on festivals.
Since I have been home, I have never looked worse, and I have never been happier nor felt more peace. I marvel at the buffet of individuality here that has survived the onslaught of social media filters and AI standards for human attractiveness. I love that our actresses don’t look like they’re straining for a poo when they are trying to cry on screen. I love that my friends order chips with every meal. I love that I can see how much British women have laughed in their lives when I look at their faces.
I don’t wish to die one day looking as though I was stoic and joyless. I want to look like I was wild, fun and absolutely crazy. Like a proper Brit.
Jameela Jamil is an actor and advocate jameelajamil.substack.com
