Anita Bhagwandas | How to not feel like an outsider and be an agent for the change you want to see in the world.
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2023
⏱️ 99 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Author and journalist Anita Bhagwandas has occupied some of the most senior beauty journalism roles in magazines and newspapers over her nearly twenty-year career. She entered the beauty industry feeling like an outsider, determined to take the white-centric, thinner-is-better ideal perpetuated in media and open it up into something much more inclusive.
Because it sucks to be an outsider. And it sucks even harder to be an outsider for things that you simply cannot do anything about, such as your skin colour.
Though Anita entered the world of beauty journalism in order to be an agent for change, she perhaps underestimated the impact the fashion and beauty world would have on her, a girl from Wales who had never felt as though she fit in or looked the right way. In many ways, she was throwing herself headlong into a world ripe to reject, dismiss and other her and, as I’m sure we’ll discuss, that was a part of her career journey she perhaps hadn’t anticipated.
Her book Ugly deep dives into why we find what we find beautiful, beautiful but perhaps, more than that, it uncovers why we assign ugly to so much, including, more often than not ourselves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Emma Gunn Show. |
| 0:09.9 | Life's defining moments don't always feel that great when they're happening. |
| 0:13.2 | In the moment they can feel challenging, uncomfortable, difficult, impossible even. |
| 0:18.0 | But with hindsight, they can take on a different shape. |
| 0:21.0 | With the benefit of that 2020 perspective, we can begin to see how the most difficult |
| 0:25.0 | times were a life lesson we didn't know we needed to learn. |
| 0:28.7 | Each week I asked my guest to share their biggest life learnings to date as we explore |
| 0:32.6 | those difficult, swampy, infuriating times and how they shaped them all from a comfortable |
| 0:37.7 | distance. |
| 0:38.7 | It's afforded them the time to take the positive out of what might have seemed nothing |
| 0:41.9 | but negative at the time. |
| 0:43.4 | Because whether it's obstacles, challenges, risks, excuses, opportunities, successes, failures |
| 0:47.9 | or curveballs, they are the reason they are the person they are today, the person sitting |
| 0:52.0 | in front of me on this episode of the Emma Gunn Show. |
| 0:55.9 | You know, all of those differences make me unique and make me different and actually |
| 0:59.7 | yeah, realising, coming around to realising that actually that was a real strength, was |
| 1:03.4 | a real, a real like big light bulb moment. |
| 1:06.1 | There are certain people in society are conditioned to not think that they deserve to take a |
| 1:11.1 | cup space. |
| 1:12.1 | Yeah, I do think falling in love is a huge risk because you don't know how it's going |
| 1:17.7 | to end. |
| 1:18.7 | I have actually really realised the perfectionism comes from a low self-esteem, like essentially, |
... |
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