Anuschka Rees

About Beyond Beautiful The Curated Closet Contact

About Beyond Beautiful The Curated Closet Contact

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Beyond Beautiful by Anuschka Rees

The Curated Closet: A simple system for discovering your personal style and building your dream wardrobe

@beyondbeautifulbook

If you're currently reading Beyond Beautiful, comment below with one thing you've read so far that you didn't know before OR your favourite section so far. 📖 ⠀
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(idea stolen from @thefuckitdiet, thanks Caroline😉)⠀
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4 key messages of #bodyneutrality. ⠀
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If you want to know more about body-neutrality and how to apply it in your everyday life, you're in luck because I wrote a whole book about just that! It's called Beyond Beautiful and the link is in my bio!⠀
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Did you know that labiaplasties are the fastest growing type of surgery in the US? In my survey that I ran for Beyond Beautiful, one woman wrote: “This is so private and I could never actually talk to anyone about it, but I feel very self-conscious about my labia minora, and I am considering plastic surgery just to make me look normal down there.” And really, it’s no surprise that so many women, including teenagers, believe that the way they look „down there“ isn’t normal. Just like for pretty much every other body part, the level of „vulva-diversity“ we see, in magazines or porn, is essentially zero. ⠀
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“Labia minora vary greatly in size, shape, and color. However, in most media that depict women’s vulvas (erotic magazines, women’s magazines, internet, porn movies), labia minora are not protruding the labia majora. These images are either digitally manipulated or show models that have undergone a labia minora reduction or women who naturally have smaller labial size, and therefore do not provide a realistic image of natural vulvas.” ⠀
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This quote comes from a 2016 study by Ellen Laan and her team at the University of Amsterdam. They found that we can improve women’s genital body image pretty instantly, simply by showing them pictures of a diverse range of vulvas and telling them that everything they see is perfectly NORMAL. ⠀
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That’s why projects like @the.vulva.gallery are so important: not only do they supply much-needed #vulvadiversity, but they also turn vulvas and our worries from something that's embarrassing/shameful into something we can (and need to) talk about. ⠀

Ok, who here dug into Beyond Beautiful this weekend and has already come across this quote? It's in the "Five myths about body image you probably believe" section and one of my personal faves 😏 ⠀
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If you haven’t gotten your copy of Beyond Beautiful yet: It’s 30% off on Amazon right now! The link is in the bio. ⠀
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#bodyneutrality

Ok you guys, today is like launch day all over again for me, because the 🇩🇪German edition of Beyond Beautiful also hits the shelves today! Thank you to everyone at @dumontbuchverlag for working so hard on this 😍😍😍 ⠀⠀
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Starting from today, you should be able to find the book in most bookstores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and of course you can order it online on Amazon, Thalia and the usual places. Natürlich könnt ihr das Buch auch ganz einfach in eurem Lieblingsbuchladen bestellen😉 ⠀⠀
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Viel Spaß beim Lesen 😘

1-minute body-neutrality challenge: Tag one friend and give them a sincere, non-appearance-based compliment. ⁣⠀
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Because even if you think your friend is absolutely gorgeous, we could all use a little extra reminder that – no matter what we look like, how much we happen to fit our society’s beauty ideal and whether or not we like what we see in the mirror at the moment– at the end of the day, we are SO much more than just our bodies. 🧡⠀
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P.S. If you missed it, scroll down our grid to find "Body confidence myth 4" for a full explanation of why appearance-based compliments are NOT a good way to boost someone's body image.⁣⠀
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And if you want more info on body-neutrality and how to actually improve your body image: I’ve got a book for that - and it’s FINALLY OUT! 🥳 If you haven’t gotten your copy of Beyond Beautiful yet, check out the links in our bio! And don’t forget you can also just walk into your local bookstore and they can order the book for you, if they don’t already have it in stock. Thank you for all of your support and lovely feedback – these past few days have been like a dream (a very, very happy exciting one) for me. 😘🤧 ⠀
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#bodyneutrality #beyondbeautiful #bodyimage #mentalhealth #bodyacceptance #femaleempowerment #nobodyshame

Let’s talk body-neutrality! Fun fact: When I first started working on Beyond Beautiful I fully expected it to follow the body-positive “All bodies are beautiful” approach. But the more I learned about body image, the more I realized that, when it comes to developing a healthy long-term body image, body positivity—in the way that it is commonly understood and presented today—means well but is not giving us all the tools we need to actually reach that goal. ⠀
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I want to make it clear that I am not anti-body-positivity. The body positivity movement has accomplished a ton of stuff and I am fully on board with promoting diversity and inclusiveness and helping people of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities feel seen. But I also think that these things are not enough. We need to go a step further and also push back on all of the ways that we as a culture keep elevating the value of attractiveness itself. Things like the fact that “aging well” is still being celebrated like it’s a major accomplishment. That even little girls get more compliments on the way they look than any other aspect of themselves. That we give the beauty routine of a female artist or entrepreneur more airtime than their creative process or opinions. All of these things contribute to girls growing up believing that what they look like is what’s going to determine how happy, successful and loved they’ll be. The inflated value of beauty is what makes the beauty standard we see in the media seem crucially relevant to our own happiness in the first place, it’s what makes people deadly afraid of “losing” their looks and doing everything in their power to prevent it, it’s what makes them attribute positive experiences to their looks/thereby discounting their other qualities, and it’s also what keeps so many people stuck in a constant state of chasing MORE beauty. Because if looking “good” leads to this much happiness then surely looking “better” is going to give me even moooore happiness. If body-neutrality resonates with you, please also check out @beauty_redefined and @beauty_sick, all absolute pioneers of the body-neutral school of thought (although they don’t explicitly use that label). #bodyneutrality

@anuschkarees @beyondbeautifulbook Blog Archive Impressum