how to be beautiful - a concise guide

Below are all the ‘beauty tips’ I have memorised and tried to live by, at some stage or another.

Want to be beautiful? Internalise these. Learn all of your flaws by heart along with their temporary fixes, but accept that you will only ever be able to address a handful at once and therefore will always look less than your potential best. Face the world confidently and with a smile, regardless, as prettiness in public is basically obligatory.

HAIR – Choose a haircut that suits your face shape, by making it look less like that shape. Buy special products to tame your frizz/volumize/add shine. Buy special shampoo and conditioner for these conditions too, despite them making no discernible difference at all. Rinse with cold water for extra shine. Get a trim every six weeks. Use a wide tooth comb in the shower. Stylish girls know to spend a few extra minutes a day on their hair.

EYEBROWS – Eyebrows frame your face. Make sure they start at the inner corner of your eye and end after the outer. Follow eyebrow trends. Never remove hair from above the brow but don’t let it grow there either. Groom them with wax and pencil and powder and stencils. Brush them back in a bit to look sexy.

EYELASHES – Your natural lashes are insufficient. Use mascara to make them thicker, longer, volumized, seperated and darker, but first wipe 90% of it off onto a tissue or your lashes will clump. Unless that is on trend, in which case hurray, your mascara will last loads longer! But throw it away after six months anyway because supposedly it will harbour bacteria and the plague.
Sometimes you can stick extra lashes on. You can do this semi permenantly but they may fall off and look like hairy spider legs on your cheek. Use blue mascara to make your eyes look whiter, or dark brown if you’re blonde. But really, just use black, or else everyone will ask why you are wearing coloured mascara. You can also curl them with instruments of Victorian torture, for absolutely no discernible difference.

EYES – Fix the wrongness of your eyes via assorted methods including using white pencil in your waterline, where it will last all of three seconds; applying eyeshadow in three similar shades in a magical allignment, drawing three dots on your lash line and lining close to the lashes.
Use an eyeshadow base to make it all last longer. Use an under eye concealer because dark circles are unsightly. Use a light reflecting concealer but not for photos because it will strobe with the flash and look odd. Have an alternative concealer that you pre-emptively apply for these occasions.

FACE – Test foundation on the inside of your wrist and then go in to daylight to look at it. The sales assistants will look at you like toxic waste if you actually do this, but it is The Rules, so do it anyway. Observe that it is a bit orange, but as it is the palest shade and you’ve been promised it will change your life, buy it anyway. Blend it to your jawline so everyone really truly believes you have a naturally orange face. Aim for a dewy finish but don’t ever cross the line into shiny. Apply green concealer to areas of redness.
Improve your nose and cheeks by contouring, which is essentially painting brown and white stripes over your skin, but don’t let anyone know you did contouring or they’ll think you’re a Kardashian. You will look fabulous in long distance photographs but a bit weird and orange in real life.
Apply blush to where you naturally flush, unless that is on the apples of your cheeks, in which case use it to sculpt and pretend your face looks different. 

All of these products should contain SPF, but you must also apply a SPF moisturiser to keep ageing at bay. Ageing is the enemy and will interfere no end with the above face-correcting practices, so stop it at all costs.

LIPS – Your lips are probably wrong too, but you can fix this by applying a combination of cosmetics that will address these issues for an hour or two. Try to avoid eating, drinking or talking after application to help it last longer. Apply gloss in the centre of your top lip to make it look fuller. Apply a darker shade to your bottom lip to make it look fuller. Fullness is the aim, here. Find your natural lip shape, which is not your actual lip shape but the one you should have been given if life was fair. Completely reshape your lips by applying concealer over your mouth then drawing a fake one on, but don’t let it wear off unevenly or everyone will know about your lip fullness failures.

BODY HAIR – remove everything from the neck down at all times. Waxing lasts the longest but hurts a lot, is messy, time consuming and expensive, causes ingrowing hairs and has to then be allowed to grow long enough to wax again, leaving you technically hideous for two weeks. Alternatively you can buy a machine that will conveniently rip every hair out of your tissue, providing all the pain of waxing with none of the mess. You can shave, but stubble is of the dark side so follow these simple steps: scrape off the top layer of skin first (“exfoliate”), soak in hot water to swell the hair shaft, shave only in the direction of the hair growth (then go back against the grain as this does FA), then apply moisturiser to your screaming & miserable skin. You’re almost there!

FINGERNAILS – These should always be clean, tidy and on-trend; fingernail trends are totally a thing and if you have long nails when they should be short or round nails when everyone else has square, you are sending a secret girl-signal out that you have let yourself go. Push back your cuticles with wooden or metal spikes because you hate yourself and enjoy pain or something so you can get more nail varnish on and make your nails look a few millimetres longer, because this is obviously v important.

That’s it! Remember to do all of this in minimal time possible, or else people will think you love yourself and are completely vain. Women take sooo long in the bathroom, right?

Keep in mind, should anyone compliment you on your appearance, that they are really just falling for the lies you have carefully constructed with cosmetics, and have no idea of the true hideous beast that lurks beneath. Build your confidence to depend on this fragile shell. True beauties are always vulnerable and insecure.