Your Beautiful: Challenging Beauty Standards

I am covered in tattoos. I started getting them when I was a teenager, years before brightly covered sleeves were a staple of trendy cafés. I realized then that I would be judged for my appearance. I still realize it. But I don’t apologize. I wear what sets me apart with pride.

Some of my tattoos have aged and faded. I’ve had others touched up, made to look new again. Each represents a stop in my journey to create my own identity. I wouldn’t change a thing.

When I look at my tattoos these days, I think about how they relate to my professional life, my role as a Registered Nurse and an internationally recognized leader within the medical aesthetic industry.

I’ve always been intensely aware of how the aesthetic we create on the outside can express how we feel on the inside. And I firmly believe that each person should be the sole author of their aesthetic as much as they are their mind, personality, and ambitions.

There is a lot of pressure put on us to conform to certain standards of beauty. Trends come and go. Aesthetics fall in and out of fashion. Maybe one agrees with a certain standard, maybe not. It’s the pressure that’s toxic. It’s the pressure to conform that should be challenged.

For instance, in professional settings, colleagues often comment that they are surprised I have so many tattoos. I wonder why that is, where the assumption comes from that professionalism and tattoos are mutually exclusive.

My tattoos and my work as a Certified Aesthetic Nurse Specialist are firmly rooted in an urge to resist the pressure while arming patients with the power to shape their own image.

Tattoos and medical aesthetics have provided me the power to determine and define my own set of beauty standards, allowing me to control and make choices without giving in to pressures placed on us by powers beyond our control. That’s the kind of support I seek to provide patients on their own journey, whether that empowers them to wake up each day with a smile or stand before shareholders delivering a quarterly report.

Your beauty is your beauty. No one else’s.

Be true and authentic to yourself. Trust your instincts. Resist being driven off course by pressures you may not agree with. Don’t be afraid to disrupt cultural ideals of beauty. Wear your sense of self with pride.

And if you need me, if my skills can be of assistance, know that I am here to support you.

-       Em