It hasn’t always been this easy to talk about beauty.

As an Asian-American woman (Filipino-American), I think I’ve always felt estranged to the concept of beauty. The standards of Asian beauty are brutal. Porcelain skin, straight hair, high-bridged noses, etc., and American standards weren’t that much better. The one thing I understood at an early age is that there was always something about me that could be improved. I grew up idolizing the beauty of women that looked nothing like me, that had a completely different ethnic background, genetic make-up, and straight up lifestyle. Let’s just put it this way: there was a point in my teenage years where I did everything I possibly could to look like Ashlee Simpson. #lala

After that, I went through the usual run-around of staring blankly at endless walls of products at drugstores, popping my first zit, plucking my eyebrows into oblivion—you know, the usual teenage shit. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college when I really hit rock bottom with my skin and came to the conclusion: “damn, I hate the way I look.” I mean, I really hated my face. I would hyper-edit my photos to smoothen out the appearance and texture of my skin. I was donning a full face of makeup before I left the house, I just didn’t have the confidence to step out with the face I was born with. Little did I know at the time that I was setting myself up for a war with self-worth.