How to Talk To Teenage Girls About Beauty and Body Image

You are not thin enough. You’re too muscular. Your arms are not slim enough.  Your eyelashes are too short, your ankles too fat, your nose is crooked, your hair too curly, you’re too short..you’re simply not enough. It’s different for everyone — because our bodies are so different — but the message is the same: Something needs to be fixed, we are not enough.

Sadly these messages are not just ones being said by women in their 20s or 30s, it’s also being said by our young women starting as young as the age of 5. Moments before sitting down to write this post I quickly went on my Instagram stories to ask if my readers were interested in reading a guide on how to talk to young girls about beauty standards and body image issues. I was blown away by the response because women were craving guidance on these conversations.

One of the other things that I was shocked about is learning that there are not very many beauty products or resources on how to empower our young girls on how to navigate around their beauty journey, except for C’est Moi Beauty. A skincare and makeup line specifically formulated for teens and tweens. Which I’ll get into in my blog post.

I’m nowhere near an expert on this, but having a teenage daughter while being someone who uses social media heavily for her own business, I’ve had to learn and grow through trial and error as well. If you’ve been walking alongside this journey for some time then you’ll know that my fitness journey actually began because of a moment when I spoke negatively about my self image in front of my daughter. Ever since then I’ve learned to be extremely mindful and conscious about how I speak about body image and beauty standards in front of my daughters, after all they are always watching.

Have an open discussion on body changes aka PUBERTY!

We’re pretty candid in our house. Sometimes that gets us into trouble, but what I’ve realized its help to do is normalize the conversation about body changes especially as our teenage daughter goes through puberty. I remember her being about 9 or 10 when she started to talk about her body changes. And let me tell you, it was the moment when I knew I needed to have that talk about periods and sex. It was really painful and I definitely needed some wine during that evening, but what was helpful was that my husband and I have always created a safe space to have open discussions about the body and its changes. Some ways we did this was to be open about our own body insecurities, which helped to normalize the emotions she was going through.

“you don’t need makeup, makeup needs you ”

Makeup comes second to wellness and beauty is truly from within.

It took me almost 30 years to learn that wellness having a fulfilling life was the key to feeling beautiful. We try to encourage the message “you don’t need makeup, makeup needs you” to our daughter. We talk about the value and importance of nourishing foods, a good night sleep, and the how healthy friendships can all impact that way we feel about ourselves from the inside out.

Of course over time she’s started to dabble more into lip glosses, became more curious about cheek colors, and eyeshadows. This is where C’est Moi Beauty plays an incredible role. Before my career in wellness and in tech, I was in beauty and hair care. For the longest time that I remember there weren’t any products that were designed for the delicate skin of tweens and teens. Brands definitely focused their energy and efforts on making skin more youthful but never focused on formulating products for the youth.

Skincare is LIFE! Building upon a strong foundation on anything is really important to me. You can’t build a strong house on a crappy foundation. And you can’t have a beautiful makeup application without having good skin and skin care to help you get there. C’est Moi Beauty creates this awesome skincare line made with natural and organic ingredients, fragrance-free, hypoallergenic, and they are EWG Verified (Environmental Working Group). Their line is extremely simple: cleanse, moisturize, and protect with sunscreen.

Other people's opinions don’t define your self-worth.

Teen girls are constantly getting inundated with opinions left and right from school, parents, siblings, friends, family members, and now strangers on the internet. Reinforce her that her self-worth is not dictated by other people’s opinions. Her worth is based on the beautiful person she is inside and how she expresses her most authentic self to the world.

Teach her to be proud of her imperfections and her self!

“In a society that profits from your self-doubt” we need to these young girls in our lives how to be proud of who they are, their talents, and how to accept and love who they are. Our lives are the journey of self-discovery and the young ladies in our lives are just barely starting to find out how to express themselves. We have to give them the space and permission to embrace who they are.

Empowerment through education, empathy, and compassion are all the tools you need to navigate conversations on body image and beauty with teenage girls. And a whole lot of love.

This post was sponsored by C’est Moi Beauty. I was compensated to write this post, but these thoughts and opinions are my 100% my own. 

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of C'est Moi. The opinions and text are all mine.

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