Embracing your natural beauty is definitely a journey. We all have our insecurities and imperfections, but I think it’s time we focus less on the established beauty norms and start embracing our differences! Those are truly what make us individuals and uniqueness is a beautiful thing.

Accentuating your natural beauty is about taking good care of your body and loving yourself the way you are. Plus, taking better care of our natural self reduces the need to reach for makeup or other things that may be hiding your natural beauty.

For a few ways to accentuate your natural beauty, here are five tips to help you reach your natural beauty potential!

Brows, Brows, Brows!

They say that your eyes are the windows to your soul. Well, your eyebrows are the frames for those windows! They add much needed structure to your face. The wrong eyebrow arch for your face shape or overplucking can take away that much needed structure and rid you of a portion of your natural beauty. You can never have enough eyebrows, so don’t be afraid to grow them out or change their shape in order to enhance your features. 

The transition can be hard to begin with, but once you reach your full eyebrow potential, you’ll thank yourself for your dedication to reinstating your face’s biggest asset.

Crack a Smile Once in a While

Your smile is your best asset and smiling instantly improves a person’s look. If you’re too shy to smile, it might be because you’re not happy with the position or shade of your teeth – and that’s perfectly fine! No one is perfect and everyone has insecurities. If this is something you’re concerned about, there’s a lot you can do to highlight their natural beauty. For example, visiting an Invisalign dentist or an orthodontist, booking a tooth scale and polish, or even just a simple whitening procedure can dramatically improve the appearance of your teeth.

You want your teeth to last you a lifetime (for practical reasons of course), but also because a nice smile really brightens up your look. Therefore, taking good care of your teeth is necessary for great oral health and to highlight your natural beauty.

Take Care of Your Skin

Your skin is the biggest organ in your body. Its appearance can often give you insight into your overall health. It can even speak volumes about your lifestyle choices. Whether you’ve skimped on sleep or you’re feeling blue, in time your skin will reveal all.

The truth is, to accentuate your skin’s natural beauty it needs pampering! On the outside, cleansing, toning, and moisturizing keeps your skin acne-free by eliminating free radicals that damage the surface. It’s also important to find a skincare routine that works best for your skin type and lifestyle. For my own skincare routine, I follow the lead established by Korean skincare experts to get a blemish-free, “glass skin” look. Check out an article I wrote on why the Korean skincare routine works.

In addition, remember that your skin needs to be supported with internal love too. This includes watching what you eat and drink. Lots of water, fruits, and vegetables will always be the best support for your skin’s overall health. This promotes plumper skin, increased skin cell regeneration, and a gorgeous glow!

Support Healthy Hair

As with skin, beautiful natural hair doesn’t just happen for everyone. It needs effort (especially if you’re a natural girl like me!), such as deep conditioning treatments, leave in conditioners, oils, and cleansing with sulfate-free shampoos to prevent stripping the scalp’s natural oils. Like your skin, it needs nutrients and lots of water too. 

Taking care of your hair isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it when you have healthy, moisturized locks. If you’re looking to grow out your hair it often helps to wear protective styles, especially during the colder, drier months so that you reduce manipulation and it can retain its moisture. It also helps to use satin sleep caps or pillow cases to reduce the friction your hair experiences on a daily basis. Or, you can always chop it all off and rock a baldie, pixie cut, or TWA (this stands for teeny weeny afro for my natural girls). This dramatically changes your look but can often be the catalyst for a huge confidence boost!

Sometimes your natural beauty takes time to shine through. It doesn’t always respond to quick fixes and requires you to show ongoing love and care to your body. Because of this, try not to get frustrated mid-way through your journey. The process is a means to an end, but it’ll be so worth it in the long run.

Embrace Who You Are On The Inside!

Lastly and most importantly, you must embrace who you are on the inside! Beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder. One person might not think you’re beautiful on the outside, but who really cares? There’s almost 8 billion people on this earth, not everyone is going to have the same opinion. The person whose opinion matters most at the end of the day, is YOU! If you feel comfortable and confident in who you are, nobody else’s opinion will phase you.

Your morals, personality, character, how you treat people, and all of the other wonderful qualities about you are what truly make you a beautiful person. If you take one thing away from this article, it should be to embrace your inner beauty and that will shine through on the outside as well.

xoxo, Arielle