Beach body
How I came to appreciate mine
This photo popped up this week as a Facebook memory with „8 years ago” title. The pixelated quality of it reminding me how much progress happened in mobile phone photography since 2016, and yet the subject is as stunning as ever. One of the few occasions in my life when reality was better than anything I could have imagined. Glorious beauty of nature, sun on my skin, sound of cicadas and smell of herbs as we were walking through shrubs to get to the shore. And I was so close to never having seen it because of my relationship with the „beach body”.
If you did, like me, enter puberty in early aughts you probably remember the horrible articles from tabloids listing who is beach body ready, or very serious long lists with tips on how to prepare yourself for the season. Based on the photos provided, it must have included removing pores from your skin, getting a few more or less invasive beauty treatments, tons of makeup and a profesional hair stylist walking with you anywhere you go. And this was just the peak of the iceberg.
Well, I had pores, and my problems only started there. On my list of absolutely-not-beach-ready features were:
Flat chest - my biggest body problem in my life. I felt (and sometimes still do) only half a woman because of my small tits. Breasts are in our culture synonymous with femininity. They’re not just another body part, they’re a symbol. I can’t count the times when I dreamed of having a cleavage.
Up to a certain age I still hoped they would come, just a little bit late, like the most desired girl in the school arrives at the prom. But they never came, I was stood up by my own boobs.
So I went on wearing push-up bras everywhere, and yet it made me feel like a fraud. And beach was the place where my scam would be exposed: you don’t wear a push-up bra to a beach unless you have something to hide. Plus it’s quite uncomfortable, with all that foam becoming wet and heavy. Maybe if you have tits bigger than mine, you can still wear a push-up and nobody would notice the deceit. That wasn’t the case for me, I had to brace myself and wear a bikini bra. Which was a total nightmare for me. I was compared to a boy many, many times in my life due to my flat chest. And I didn’t want to be a boy. I wanted to be a woman. In my head I couldn’t be a woman on a beach, I would be a boy in the eyes of all the people. So I avoided it by all costs.
Pale skin - but not the gothic romance slash Snow White porcelain perfection, but piggy pink complexion that turns beetroot red on any contact with sun. Which means that it… Never. Gets. Tanned. The absolute horror for any Polish girl or woman. Because only tanned is pretty, only tanned is sexy. Only tanned gives you the permission to show your skin in summer. Generations of women in my family spent hours torturing themselves to get at least a slight hue switch from pale pink to bright caramel color.
My grandma used to repeat to me the saying as old as womanhood that you first have to suffer to become beautiful, every time I was complaining about sunburns.
My mom recalling putting on cocoa oil (to speed up the tanning process) and lying flat with no sunscreen on pitch-black roofing felt to get tanned, ehm, burned quickly. She then waited for days in pain to shed the burnt skin like a lizard and reveal the better, sexier light-caramel-colored skin. The process needed to be repeated a few more times for the desired results. I joined the rite of passage only to state that in my case after days of suffering the burnt beetroot goes back to pale pink shade. All hope abandon, ye who tan here. I would never be tanned, and I would never be sexy.
Chicken skin - professionally called “keratosis pilaris”, a skin condition developed when keratin forms a scaly plug that blocks the opening of the hair follicle. It results in tiny rough and red bumps on the skin surface, hence the name. I had a chicken skin, and no one ever wanted to see a chicken in a bikini.
Cellulite - yes, the classic problem faced by 90% of women due to the way their fat cells are distributed under the skin. As natural as having armpits, but somehow nobody decided to make money by shaming us about having armpits. Yet. And if you’re wondering now if cellulite was a marketing invention - yes, of course. And a very lucrative one:
The global cellulite treatment market was valued at $2276.40 million in 2022 and is evaluated to reach $5584.90 million in 2032, growing at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 9.44% during the forecast period 2023 to 2032.
It explains why when you want to find an article or a video explaining what cellulite is, you won’t find anything that wouldn’t immediately try to sell you products, treatments and diets to get rid of it. I believed that the fusion of pale pink skin with keratosis pilaris and cellulite made me the absolute opposite of beach ready.
Very light eye lashes and brows, combined with moderately dark brown hair - I was convinced I’m a failed mix of two worlds: dark hair (which in the perfect world should go with dark eye lashes, which then removes the need to use a mascara) and blue eyes (which “normally” should go with blonde hair so that no one will expect my lashes to be other than light colored). So I needed makeup, mostly mascara and eyeliner - just to make my eyes more visible, more pretty. My mom would always tell me that I look so much better with my eyes made up. But you can’t wear a mascara to a beach, unless you don’t mind ending up looking like a panda. There are the waterproof ones, but they’re usually hard to remove, and I have very sensitive eyes. I didn’t want to be a panda, but I also felt un-pretty without the mascara on - yet another ritual which I used to make myself more attractive was stripped away from me in the beach scenario.
I could add some more points to this list, but these were the main points of concern for me. Put together they were so horrible and terrifying in my opinion, that I couldn’t have imagined enjoying going to a beach and stripping down to a bikini as a part of the process.
Bikini was a trophy outfit - the tiniest attire with the biggest strings attached. You had to work for it, go through pain, sweat and tears. You couldn’t simply put it on and parade your body the way it is in front of others. No, it was the coronation ceremony of the beach body quest.
I truly believed that for a very long time. Avoided any kind of situation where a bikini was the expected uniform. I can’t say for certain but I think I didn’t go to a lake or a beach at all between 18 and 29 years old. Living in a city with no access to a beach made it easier, but only part of it were the circumstances. It was also a choice.
At 29 years old I arrived in Lisbon. The excuse of no beach in vicinity didn’t hold up anymore. And yet I never wanted to go. All because of the conviction that I will never deserve to crown my imperfect body with a bikini, especially that I don’t do anything to change that. But along that mean judgemental voice in my head, another one became louder and louder with every day I spent there. The one that had enough and wanted to break free. The one that felt tired of all the opinions others might have on me and honestly didn’t care anymore. That voice made me go and buy a first bikini in over 10 years. I chose a strong neon greenish yellow color - I wanted my crown to shine bright.
I already had my flight back to Poland scheduled in a few days, when my friend Lorenza suggested I come to a beach that’s a short car ride away and a little bit secluded. It was supposed to be one of the most beautiful beaches near Lisbon. After seeing some photos online I knew this would be the beach to try out my new bikini.
I was expecting something special, but what I saw (and you can see on the photo above) totally blew my mind. It was probably the closest to a paradise setting I’ve ever been in my life. I stripped down to my bikini and sat there in awe. Thinking of all the joy I might have missed and knowing I will never make that mistake again.
There were quite a number of people around: families with kids, women and men of all ages, shapes and sizes. None of them had perfect airbrushed legs. All of them had pores on their skin. None of them was “beach ready”, and yet all of them had a perfect beach body.
Go and enjoy your beach body this summer. The girl from the video will celebrate with you.
It is an impossible goal to have a beach body. A woman is not trained to ever feel that she is enough. I grew up walking distance from the most known beaches of the world and I felt I wasn't good enough to go. I would hear people watching any woman less than perfect on the beach and asking "how does she have the courage?". This is something that Berlin (!) helped me with.
Thank you for sharing your story, Monika!