skin freedom
Our relationship with our skin may feel inconsequential, but as Stylist’s digital content director Felicity Thistlethwaite shares, in a world in which flawless skin is celebrated, skin that doesn’t fit that narrow ideal can impact every part of us. Something that Stylist’s Skin Freedom campaign wants to change…
words: felicity thistlEthwaite
Skin is the body’s largest organ and is totally unique to the person who wears it, reflecting everything from our heritage and our health to how we crease our eyes when we laugh. And yet if you looked at the majority of the media and social media we consume today, you’d think it was one skin fits all. That filtered, contoured, blemish-free skin doesn’t look like the skin we see in the mirror, in the shower or on the woman next to us on the Tube. Because real skin, our skin, reveals the life we’ve lived. It shows our wrinkles, our stretch marks, our spots, our eyebags, our ingrown hairs, our pigmentation, our hair, our bruises, our scars. It shows our stress, our exhaustion, our week in wants to address. We know that it’s naïve to suggest that we should all love our skin unconditionally. We’ve weathered decades of messaging that our skin should be perfect, and it’s hard to shed that overnight. So, what wants to see is a move towards Skin Freedom. For , Skin Freedom means: to live life in your own skin without feeling external pressure to cover it, hide it or filter it. To establish a relationship with your skin on your own terms, not anybody else’s. As part of our Skin Freedom campaign, we’re launching a new series on Stylist.co.uk called Skin Stories, where we’ll hear from different women about their relationship with their skin, and hopefully start important conversations, shed shame and show more of the skin we recognise when we look in the mirror. To kickstart that series, Felicity Thistlethwaite shares the story of her own skin journey with psoriasis, a condition that, at times, has made her want to hide her skin away from the world.
