Just about everyone has their own insecurities and handle them in different ways. If that wasn’t clear before, it definitely is now, because apparently even the famously beautiful Eva Mendes has had insecurities about the way she looked in her prime in Hollywood. The Training Day star has now opened up about her past insecurities as an actress in a candid post.
Eva Mendes was once voted most desirable woman by a men’s only website and was on the top of pretty much all men’s (and even some women’s) celebrity cheat list. That reputation of being a Hollywood hottie apparently didn’t stop her from developing some serious insecurities about the way she looked, though, because she has now come clean in an Instagram post. Mendes posted a photo of herself from 20 years ago, when she was in her Hollywood prime, with a caption saying that she used to look at that photo and see only how weirdly shaped her face was. You can see the post and photo of Mendes below:
If that’s a weird shaped face, I don’t even want to know what Eva Mendes would think of mine. Just kidding, it’s easy to look at pictures of yourself and only see the faults, especially when you have the impossible Hollywood standards of beauty and body image to compete with. The vast majority of people who look at the same picture would only see a beautiful woman - some women would even kill to have the same features Mendes saw as “weird.”
In fact, Eva Mendes even says that now, 20 years later, she can look at the photo and feel some kind of envy toward her younger self for having such bone structure. While it’s awesome she can look back and love herself in the picture today, it still sounds like she may still battle image issues now, even though she’s still pretty much a goddess now that she’s a mother and into her late 40s. It just goes to show that what we see in the mirror or photos can be seen very differently by other people. The flaws we see in ourselves can be features that others think are the most beautiful.
While this is a common occurrence in a lot of people, it can be a pretty serious mental health battle for some. What Mendes is describing is a mild version of a phenomenon known as body dysmorphia, and some people have very serious cases of it that lead to eating disorders and other serious health risks. When a person starts fixating on a certain feature of themselves that they see as a major flaw, it has the potential to become pretty dangerous.
This is why it is important to check ourselves and see our worth in more than just our appearance and to learn to love what may make us different, including the features we may not be a huge fan of. What we see as a negative feature, someone may envy, especially our future selves. Eva Mendes’ post is a perfect reminder that everyone is their own worst critic and that anyone can have at least some negative thoughts about the way they look - even someone like Mendes, whose picture is probably still plastered all over teenagers’ walls.
