Bollywood actress Parineeti Chopra is known for her confident demeanour. But the actress has her share of insecurities too, as she recently revealed in an interview. “I am not an insecure person, but I am aware that I am not as good looking as an actress is expected to be. There are girls who look stunning on screen; I don’t...” she shared.
Parineeti is hardly the only actress to have professed feeling insecure about her looks. While those in the glamour industry are often looked up to as epitomising the ideas of beauty, they do not often hold their own looks in the same high regard. From Hollywood actresses like Katie Holmes, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Lopez and Taylor Swift, to Bollywood actresses like Parineeti and Bipasha Basu, many of them have revealed they do not consider themselves “pretty enough”. Actress Megan Fox has said that seeing herself on the monitors while on the sets of a shoot can “trigger off an anxiety attack”.
As part of an initiative to tackle the negative body image young women can often have about themselves, a newspaper in the UK prompted well known personalities to write a letter to their younger selves, appreciating all the aspects of their looks that they didn’t when they were actually at that age. The letters reflected the understanding that these personalities developed later in life, that there had been nothing “wrong” about the way they looked in their 20s to start off with!
While the insecurity about their looks can be an overall one, sometimes it may be restricted to what the woman feels is a “problem area”. Bipasha Basu has said in an interview, “I think I have really ugly feet. That’s why I (cover them up) all the time.” While fretting about how your arms or hips look is quite common, experts advise that it shouldn’t reach a stage where you’re overly concerned with it, where you feel a certain aspect about you is “grotesque” — a condition called Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
“Some of these insecurities may stem from battling self-esteem issues,” says psychiatrist Dr Sharita Shah. “A lot of this stems from your life experiences — experiences may be positive or negative, but everyone has a different way of viewing them,” adds Dr Shah.
In fact, working in an industry where they are held to impossibly high standards, and their looks are a “currency” to getting success and fame, such insecurity may even be justified. “You may look at beauty magazines or films and want to look as flawless as a star, but for the celebrity herself (or himself) this is a reality they have to deal with: They’re surrounded by peers who look a certain way, there is so much scrutiny on their looks — it takes a really thick skin to avoid self doubt,” says celebrity manager Neeti Khosla.
And even celebrities are prone to all the human traits at the end of the day. “A celebrity’s public image is not how they perceive themselves,” points out Dr Shah. “It is a persona crafted by professionals.”
