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high school. This wave was also<br />
bound to crash.<br />
I moved to New York City in<br />
the January of 2014. I attended<br />
the City College of New York<br />
and had an apartment all to<br />
myself in the Upper East Side.<br />
I had a diverse group of friends<br />
and truly enjoyed every single<br />
day. My self-image, however,<br />
wasn’t having as great of a time.<br />
New York City is the fashion<br />
and media capital of the<br />
I feel beautiful because I<br />
have been doing and<br />
sharing with the world the<br />
things I love most...<br />
world. As you can imagine, I<br />
was constantly surrounded by<br />
beautiful people -- but what<br />
struck me was that their beauty<br />
was natural. My Alabamian<br />
ways of always having on a full<br />
face of makeup stood out. I<br />
was already battling the idea of<br />
natural beauty, but it only hit<br />
me when one day on the train<br />
home from school, one of my<br />
friends bluntly asked me, “why<br />
have we never seen you without<br />
makeup on?” I brushed it off in<br />
the moment, but it stuck. When<br />
I looked at myself in the mirror<br />
without makeup on, I felt<br />
absolutely hideous. As much as<br />
I enjoyed makeup, I also wanted<br />
to be that natural beauty who<br />
didn’t have to exert as much<br />
effort.<br />
Life and my ideas of beauty<br />
have since taken many more<br />
turns. I now sit here writing<br />
this as an almost 22 year old,<br />
almost senior at The University<br />
of Alabama, with my most clear<br />
idea of what beauty is to date.<br />
Beauty and being beautiful is<br />
what you make of it. At this<br />
point in my life, I feel the<br />
absolute most beautiful I have<br />
ever felt, and it has nothing<br />
to do with what I see in the<br />
mirror. I feel beautiful because<br />
I have been doing and sharing<br />
with the world the things I love<br />
most: cooking, writing and<br />
conversation. Some days I wear<br />
absolutely no makeup, and some<br />
days I wear a cranberry-sunset<br />
smokey eye that may have taken<br />
me 4 hours to do. Both days I<br />
feel equally as beautiful because<br />
I have learned that what makes<br />
you feel this way is internal. If<br />
we give ourselves the approval<br />
we seek from other people, then<br />
it doesn’t matter what your skin<br />
tone is, or whether you look like<br />
someone or whether you wear a<br />
lot of makeup. All that matters<br />
is how you feel about you.<br />
50 <strong>Alice</strong> Spring 2018
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