Embracing Your Uniqueness with Anita East

Being a true homebody means being at home with yourself first, and there's no better way to do that than loving everything that makes you, you! We sat down with the author of 'Beautiful Unique Faces', Anita East, to chat about the simple first steps everyone can take, towards embracing their uniqueness, and finding happiness in their own beautiful skin.

Anita East is the CEO of Anita East Medispa, a clinic specialising in non-surgical cosmetic medicine. Full time mother to two darling daughters, Anita is determined to make the world a safer and more accepting place for when they grow up and ask; “Am I beautiful enough?” Her new book, 'Beautiful Unique Faces', cuts through the noise in our heads to get to the truth of our beauty, and rips apart society’s expectations of perfection.

What is the most important first step to take towards embracing and loving your natural beauty?
Identifying what is most beautiful and unique about your face will see you on the delicious journey to uncovering your natural beauty. We are all born with one Unique Facial Feature. It might be our smile, our eyes, our cheeks, our chin, our jaw, our profile, our lips, our eyebrows and so on, you get the picture. But realistically we only have one. It’s paramount that we discover what this is, so that we always have the secret to us looking beautiful. So often, we look at others to see what they are doing to themselves and we make the mistake of assuming it‘s what we need to do to make us beautiful. If we look good in green and yet everyone’s wearing red, we assume we must wear red too. We don’t know, what we don’t know!

It’s so important to be guided by our own Unique Facial Feature so that we can see social media temptation for what it is. We can appreciate what someone else including influencers, friends and celebrities might be doing to their faces, but safe in the knowledge of our Unique Facial Feature, we can say with strength; “hey just because she’s having her lips done, doesn’t mean I need to have my lips done”. Often, we are sold the idea on social media, that it’s best to have many Unique Facial Features. This is not the case. If we have more than one Unique Facial Feature, we dilute what is most beautiful about us and in turn, often makes us less beautiful.

Do you use a specific routine to help with self-love (e.g. affirmations, etc.), and if so, how can we each find our own special routine?
This is such a great question. I have actually designed a specific and simple routine that has helped me and thousands of women to have self-love in their lives. I have named it the ‘Inner Power Practice’ and I describe and teach it in detail in my book ‘Beautiful Unique Faces’. My ‘Inner Power Practice’ is what keeps me from getting sucked into the rabbit hole of comparison and self-loathing that like all women, threatens to consume me. Remember, what you see on social media and the in the media isn’t real. It’s a mere snippet of time, with quite possibly, a truck load of face altering filters applied.

The great thing about the ‘Inner Power Practice’ is that once you know it, you can do it anywhere and at any time and no one will ever know.

What have you found to be the biggest negative influence on people's ability to embrace their natural beauty?
This is an easy one. Social media has enabled us to be more connected but less accepted than ever before. We are always being fed the idea that we are not enough. Not pretty enough, thin enough, fit enough, clever enough. Quite simply, just not enough. Thanks to increasing pressure to look beautiful from social media, influencers, friends, society and even our own self-expectations, women and girls are in the stranglehold of a sickening mental health crisis.

While Botox and injectables aren’t new, their availability, price point and the relentlessness of Instagram and the media has given women across the world a skewed idea of what’s both aspirational and attainable in facial beauty. Clinics opening on every street corner offering packages to all who pass through their door, mean that all women are chasing this idea that they need to have the perfect lips, perfect cheeks, perfect chin, perfect jaw, and perfect frozen and expressionless face to be happy. Sadly, happiness has never and will never come in the form of a syringe and women are finally starting to ask the question, “what will actually make me beautiful and what will make me happy?”

What have you found to be the biggest positive influence on people's ability to embrace their natural beauty?
Knowledge and empowerment. Discovering and understanding your Unique Facial Feature is by far the most positive influence any woman can have on their beauty. Like Nessie, she came to me at 29 years old and having already had plastic surgery. Nessie confessed that she was addicted to looking at pictures of other women on Instagram. She showed me a myriad of screenshots she’d saved under separate folders in her phone. Each folder had a title; ‘lips’, ‘cheeks’, ‘chin’, ‘eyes’, ‘nose’, ‘forehead, ‘jaw’ and so on. Each folder contained 50 or more pictures of her ‘ideal’ feature.

Nessie wanted to select her facial features from a menu, like she was choosing ingredients for her smoothie. Once I helped her discover her Unique Facial Feature, Nessie’s life was changed. She stopped looking for happiness in imagined beauty and focused on her own nature given Beautiful Unique Face. This story isn’t isolated to young women. My book tells the stories of women of all ages and their journey of discovery, into finding their Beautiful Unique Faces.

What are your top 3 tips for women who are beginning their journey to revel in their unique beauty?

1. Buy my book ‘Beautiful Unique Faces’ and read all the stories of women just like you and reveal what is most beautiful about you. Learn about and do the ‘Inner Power Practice’.

2. When you are feeling overwhelmed by self-loathing from comparing yourself to another and you get that icky feeling in your heart, turn off social media and look outside at the real world. Find a window and simply look outside. Better still, get outside. Drink a big glass of water and feel it cleanse and nourish your body.

3. Remove from your life or unfollow anyone who regularly makes you feel that icky feeling in your heart I describe in tip #2. Find someone who makes who feel joy in your heart. Be with them or follow them instead. Observe the change that replacing this person in your life, makes on your self-love and self-worth.

Anita's book,'Beautiful Unique Faces'provides vital information and inspiration to guide our journeys to embracing our uniqueness. Buy your copy here, or head to her website here to read more!