Do you have any beauty regrets?
This question came about after a long discussion with my neighbor about sunscreen! He’s fair skinned with red hair, and he mentioned how he regrets tanning when he was in his 20s and 30s. Now that he’s older, his skin has sun damage that’s difficult to deal with.
I never tried to actively tan, but I do wish that I wore sunscreen consistently at an earlier age. When I was a kid, I was outside all the time, especially in the summer, and often for hours on end. The only time I wore sunscreen, though, was when we went to the beach or the lake. Crazy! And when I started wearing sunscreen daily, it wasn’t until college.
Anywho, beauty regrets. Here are some of mine in no particular order!
- Not wearing enough sunscreen at a younger age and not often enough
- Plucking my brows to oblivion in the ’90s
- Aggressive tugging on my eyelids to apply makeup, especially eyeliner
- Believing I “needed” to contour my nose to make it straighter; this went on for a while and in I’m glad I found my way out of it because it wasn’t doing any favors for my mental health
But by far the biggest regret is not really truly appreciating what I had at the time, because my goodness, I see pictures of myself when I was younger and can’t believe I had that much collagen. (Or hair, for that matter.) If I could, I’d go back in time and give Baby Karen a big old hug, and tell her that she 1) doesn’t really need all that concealer, and 2) she’s going to be just fine.
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
Mine #1 is tanning. I laid out during the worst time of day (10a-2p) all of my teens & twenties, then graduated to tanning beds in my 30’s! My gosh it’s a wonder I don’t have skin cancer. It was a race between me & my best friend which could get the darkest every summer.
I stopped (finally) when I hit 37 or 38. Now I wear sunscreen 365 days/year. No matter if it’s cloudy, stormy, whatever-I slather it on hoping to make up for all those years!
My #1 beauty regret is also tanning. I was addicted to tanning beds and I regret that so much. I get my skin checked by my dermatologist every year now. I’m still not perfect with sunscreen, but much better than my youth.
#2 would be money spent. I have definitely wasted money on beauty products over the years.
As a redhead, the number of redheads who purposely tanned always surprises me. I never purposely tanned, and I started sunscreen daily a lot younger than most folks (thanks all the teen magazines I read!), but I absolutely have made mistakes in the sun. For me, sunscreen only works for so long but at a certain point, I have to go inside because sunscreen just lengthens the time you can go without burning. I only started being good about hats in the past 5 years – scalp burns even just along the hairline are ROUGH.
Skin picking is probably my biggest regret but I KEEP DOING IT. Also, not seeing a dermatologist earlier for rosacea!
My only regret is spending too much time in the sun as a child. Grew up in the 60’s and I don’t remember SPF back then. I just remember the myth that if I burned hard enough I would eventually tan. Sigh. After I graduated college and moved to NY, I remember going to a friends home in upstate NY and wearing SPF 15 around her pool and her brother sarcastically calling it liquid shirt. As I discovered higher and higher SPF numbers I just kept bumping up my coverage.
Other than that, I don’t think I ever paid enough attention to the beauty industry to be bothered doing anything other than my own thing when it comes to makeup.
That doesn’t mean I’m not hurt by mean or disrespectful comments from others though.
My biggest beauty regret besides the thin eyebrows (they grew back, thank goodness) is just being the harshest critic of my own face and thinking if I just did this, or that, THEN I’d be happy with how I look. I look back and say, oh my gosh i looked like a perfectly human human. I think I’d also want to go back and give baby Sami a hug and say, one day you’re gonna have a little girl that looks just like you, and you’re going to think she’s the most beautiful thing on earth. So like, put down the contouring products.