🇬🇧 About beauty and insecurity

How is your relationship with your own appearance? How do you feel about being naked in front of someone else? What is your relationship with nudity?

I'm Nycka Nunes, I'm a visual artist and photographer. In photography, as in my previous work as a stylist, I seek to value the unique beauty of each client and in this text I talk about one of my experiences of changing my perception of my beauty, overcoming insecurities I had as a teenager.

I have café au lait skin (just visit my Instagram profile to see photos of me without makeup). My torso is very light (there are few photos that show this). My arms are a shade like a latte with the same amount of each because they are more exposed to the sun.

I shoot nudes and boudoir. Today I talk about my insecurity regarding the colour of my nipples. They are dark. Today I like their contrast with the pale skin of my breasts, but as a teenager and in my twenties, I was embarrassed to even change my clothes in front of someone. All the women whose breasts I had seen at that time had pale nipples. So I felt very “abnormal”. For those who don't know, I suffered bullying from people in my maternal family my entire life, until I cut ties with all these people who were always bad for my mental health. So, being physically different from all women in something, in my adolescence and early adulthood, had a bearing on the way I saw myself. And I was very insecure.

Over time, I became emotionally detached from those who only tried to diminish me and my self-image began to change. Mainly because, in the case of my relatives, their favourite adjectives were that I was ugly, stupid and useless. I had been working since I was 5 years old (for them), and I always had good grades in most of my school subjects. So why would I be ugly if the other two things I wasn't?

Another important factor is that I was well accepted at school, and treated like a princess by my father's family, so I had a repertoire of different opinions about myself. I just gave excessive importance to the negative opinions of my mother's family because it is normal to want to be accepted and welcomed by our mothers and families. As I never went, even though they pretended otherwise to third parties, there came a point where I got tired of looking for acceptance.

Even today, it's rare for me to see women with pale skin and dark nipples. It's more common to see men like this. But I learned to enjoy being different, to use style resources, not aesthetic procedures, to find my unique and authentic beauty.

Of course, it's very easy to talk about this once the problem has been overcome. It wasn't easy to deal with this while it was still a problem. But perhaps the look of a photographer who overcame this and other self-image issues will be useful for you to see yourself with different eyes? I'm also happy to work to celebrate the change in perception that has already happened or the beauty that you always had and knew how to have. Visit the services page to book an exclusive photo shoot.

Respect copyright.

Nycka Nunes