Beauty is the Eternal WIP
'Women who are drawn to the promise of a better version of themselves'
News & Reviews Magazine
This article is part of our April edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable. If you like that this type of independent media exists, please back it!
The piece you’re reading now is by Divya Venkataraman. Divya is a writer, editor and presenter based in London. She writes across fashion, culture, travel and sustainability for publications like The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar and more. Previously, she was an editor at Vogue Australia, GQ and Vogue Living, and also contributed regularly to Vogue Australia’s print editions. She has also been a regular contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald. Her work has appeared in publications such as British Vogue, The Australian and Meanjin. Divya also just launched her own Substack, The Fuse, with Diana Reid.
Divya writes for News & Reviews Magazine each month. These are three of her pieces from previous editions:
Writing about beauty asks for an intimacy that goes against social convention. It’s like talking about money, or bodily fluids. Unsightly, usually hidden. To admit to wanting to attain beauty is base, but even people who are so obviously beautiful that it would be absurd to apply any ‘in the eye of the beholder’ qualification aren’t allowed to admit that they’re beautiful, either. (Think of the trap set by Regina George: ‘So you agree… you think you’re really pretty?’). Beauty must be batted away, demurred, laughed off. Its effort concealed, its work underplayed.
In Beauty, Bri goes deeper into some of the more personal topics she touched on in Eggshell Skull—the disordered eating, the way it affected her sense of self-worth, how it became the physical manifestation of her anxiety and perfectionism. The essay goes into painstaking, methodical detail, flouting any of those social conventions. She details how she threw up after dinner, the exact rations she allowed herself before an important photo shoot, to the point where it’s almost instructional. This was one of the criticisms weighed at Beauty—that it gave too many useful pointers to those who wanted to follow get-skinny-quick methods—but I personally found it painfully honest, a truer reflection of the endless chatter that occupied my own mind in my own phases of food obsession, than anything I’d read before.
‘Self-improvement without self-loathing seemed impossible,’ she writes. ‘In life you had to be both the horse and the jockey: whipping and giving directions while your own lungs filled with blood.’