How I've learnt to accept feeling ugly: With startling honesty, one woman describes how her looks have affected her life



Mae West once said: ‘I believe it’s better to be looked over than it is to be overlooked.’ She’s right, of course. But what did she know?



Like many women lucky enough to be born beautiful, she couldn’t have truly understood how it feels to go through life with the knowledge that you’ve fallen from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.



Until the age of five, I was blissfully unaware of how my looks — or lack of them — would affect my life. Of course, starting school changed all that and brought with it the dawning realisation that I wasn’t pretty like a lot of the other girls in my class.



I am what I am: Shona has grown to accept who she is

I’d been born with a birthmark rendering me blind in my right eye and while that had been surgically removed it took years for my eye to open properly (I still have a squint).



And as if this wasn’t enough, my front teeth were prominent and crooked, which immediately earned me the nickname Bugs Bunny. It’s a wonder my mother hadn’t shoved me at the midwife and done a runner.

Thirty-five years on, not that much has changed. I may have learned not to care so deeply, but I can see — out of one eye at least — how having a face that is ‘different’ (which is just another word for ugly) has held me back in many areas of my life.



So it came as no surprise to read this week that there’s talk of a new kind of ‘ism’ emerging in society. Lookism — discrimination against people because of their appearance to the detriment of their success and wellbeing — is the subject of several court actions in the U.S., with some experts arguing that ugliness is no different from race or disability and that unattractive people who have been treated badly deserve legal action, too.

Born this way: A birth defect meant Shona couldn't open one of her eyes properly as a child

While I’m not rushing to find a lawyer (this is Britain after all), it is comforting to have my long-held suspicions confirmed — that beautiful people have an easier time of it.



I may not have been endowed with the looks of the young Brigitte Bardot, but at least I am not stupid. And it’s been clear to me for years that being plain is one of life’s unspoken handicaps.



Having gorgeous parents didn’t help. My father was a model in the Sixties, posing in a sheepskin coat to advertise a well-known cigarette brand. My mother, with her violet blue eyes and thick dark hair, looked like a cross between a young Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh.



I’ll never forget having lunch at the home of my eccentric great aunt when she put down her fork, appraised me across the table and said: ‘Well, you clearly haven’t inherited your mother’s looks. I hope, for your sake, you’ve got a strong personality.’



'My aunt sneered: "Well, you clearly haven’t inherited your mother’s looks. I hope, for your sake, you’ve got a strong personality"'

I felt crushed, of course. I sensed, even at that age, that being pretty gave you advantages I didn’t have. Friends, for a start.



Schoolgirls can be horribly cruel and will seek out weaknesses in others — no matter how shallow — to gain control in the playground.



Needless to say, the ones with long blonde hair and straight teeth were the most popular, ruthlessly excluding the geeky girls like me.



Moving to Australia when I was 13 only made matters worse. At an inner- city Sydney school, I was surrounded by Amazonian, leggy, teenage girls — tanned, sporty and, of course, naturally confident.



I will never forgive my mother for making me wear a buttoned up blazer and skirt down to my knees on my first day. It helped finish off the pasty, pimply look I’d been acquiring so carefully over a British winter.



Needless to say, I was yet again on the social periphery — I was never invited to a surfing party or barbecue during my entire miserable time Down Under.



A year later, I begged to be sent back to boarding school in Britain. At least there I could get on with the business of puberty and feeling ugly without having to wear a bikini.



Unfortunately for me, I was not one of those ‘ugly duckling’ teenagers either. There was no Hollywood movie moment of blossoming into a beautiful swan just before the end of the school prom, with the entire school year exclaiming: ‘We never knew she was so lovely.’



Instead, I headed off to university hoping to snog any boy who would oblige in the dark recesses of the student bar. In fact, the only guys even vaguely interested in talking to me were bespectacled chemistry undergrads or gay.



After a year, feeling out of place and lonely, I dropped out and joined a local newspaper as a trainee.



It was there that I had my first serious romance, but not with a fellow trainee or reporter. At the age of 19, I moved in with a 43-year-old divorced farmer — and his cow, Gertrude.



The only way someone who looked like me was going to find romance was by hiding myself in the depths of the Sussex countryside with a man who spent his days digging potatoes and making pigswill.



He ended up chucking all my stuff in the mud outside his front door. I moved to London to embark on a career as a journalist.



It was there, just a year later, that I met my husband, Keith, on a trade publication. He was in the sales department, had a motorbike and a glamorous past living in Paris.



He was such a normal looking 20-something guy that I had to keep checking he was interested in me and not the blonde girl with big boobs sitting at the desk behind me.



But, indeed, he was, and for the first time in my life I felt attractive — because he made me feel that way. He told me repeatedly how he loved the way I looked — and still does.





'People usually take me seriously and assume a level of intelligence because you’d have to be really unlucky to look like me and not have something else going for you'

It has taken me 18 years and four children to believe him, and even now I think he just must be one of those rare men who is more interested in inner beauty.



I’ve finally learned to accept that I am not — and never will be — a ‘looker’.



In the past, I’ve flirted with the idea that I might have a ‘quirky’ look — along the lines of the actress Joan Cusack, who played Melanie Griffiths’s less attractive friend in Working Girl.



Someone who is not obviously beautiful, but with interesting, redeeming features. Yet I now realise this isn’t the case.



My face is neither that unusual nor that pleasant to look at. And no amount of make-up, carefully styled hair or fashion sense is going to change the fact builders don’t whistle when I walk down the street and heads don’t turn.



I may as well put a bin bag over my head for all the impact my face has.



But this is fine. I am what I am and nothing — apart from a fortune spent on plastic surgery — is going to change this for me.



But when I see how doors open, literally and metaphorically, for friends who are less facially challenged, I feel like that five-year-old in the playground all over again, burning with indignation that the other girls won’t let me play with them because I have buck teeth and short brown hair.

Marital bliss: A radiant Shona with husband Keith on their wedding day

I recently went on holiday with an old school friend to celebrate our joint 40th birthdays. She is single, blonde and very attractive.



Throughout our trip, men were holding doors open for her (and then letting them swing in my face); carrying her bag, but ignoring mine; and falling over themselves to buy her drinks and apply her sun lotion.



I have to admit I felt enraged at being invisible and blatantly ignored.



It’s a harsh fact of life, but at least I won’t have to go through the agony of losing my looks because they were never there in the first place.



According to the dermatologist Debra Luftman and psychiatrist Dr Eva Ritvo — authors of The Beauty Prescription: The Complete Formula For Looking And Feeling Beautiful — your physical attributes are only part of what makes you attractive.



Research shows that others see you as 20 per cent more attractive than you think you are. That’s because, when you look in the mirror, you’re simply judging yourself on looks. All you can see is your reflection — but none of the personality.



‘There’s so much more to beauty than looks alone,’ says Dr Luftman. ‘A great figure, shiny hair and lovely skin may turn heads and get you noticed, but beauty is also about the way you move, speak and express yourself. It’s about good health, warmth, spontaneity and charisma.’





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This is probably just another way of saying that if, like me, you’ve pulled the short straw in the pretty stakes, work on your personality.



As upsetting as coming to terms with my looks has been, I have learned there are a few advantages.



One of the first jobs I got, straight out of journalism college, was as PA to Bob Wheaton, the editor of BBC Breakfast News and, at the time, Jill Dando’s partner.



While I congratulated myself on landing a role hundreds of other people had gone for and secretly put it down to my killer news instinct and honed research skills, someone in the newsroom one day dropped the bombshell that Jill paid close attention to Bob’s female editorial assistants — and as far as she was concerned, the less attractive they were the better.



Other good points? I don’t have conversations with the tops of men’s heads as they drool at my chest and, needless to say, I’ve never had to suffer the indignity of being dismissed as ‘just a pretty face’.



On the contrary, people usually take me seriously and assume a level of intelligence because you’d have to be really unlucky to look like me and not have something else going for you.

Facing facts: While she feels she's often a victim of 'lookism', Shona has no intention of changing her face with cosmetic surgery

That’s not to say my appearance doesn’t sometimes impede on my life.



As a writer who draws on her own experience, I often need to have my photograph taken to illustrate my articles and these pictures can provoke derision.



Just last month, I wrote a feature in Femail about the ups and downs of marriage, inviting the usual feedback on the Daily Mail website.



Obviously, not all readers agreed with me and said so. That is only to be expected — and welcomed.



But one reader commented: ‘Not this cross-eyed woman again.’ Point noted. Next time I’ll put a bucket on my head.



Though I feel incredibly lucky in countless ways — my husband doesn’t wince when he looks at me and my children tell me I’m pretty (clearly an attempt to procure chocolate) — I do sometimes wish I knew how it felt to have a face that could launch a thousand ships or, at the very least, inspire the postman to wink at me in the morning.



After all, deep down, isn’t being pretty what every woman secretly wants to be?

