Beyond Body Positivity: What It Means to Feel Beautiful

Dear Reader,

Do you remember when—and how—you first heard about Verily magazine?

For me, it was the year after I finished studying for my MA in magazine journalism in London, and found myself disillusioned not only with the industry but also with women as a consumer “audience” of magazines—at least, as women were perceived by the industry. Unable to afford to take the entry level magazine jobs available to me (in which a Devil Wears Prada-style editorial assistant role wouldn’t pay enough to cover basic living expenses in London), I had moved back to my home town of Oxford and worked in a series of uninspiring marketing jobs.

While doing my MA, I became discouraged by the way the magazine industry saw women; sure, the top editors told me and my fellow magazine journalism student peers, we like to think we want to read edifying stories that encourage healthy body image and intellectual development, that nourish the body, spirit, and mind, but in reality women will only pay money for content that makes them feel better about themselves by putting other women down. The magazines they believed sold best (and that paid the bills with advertisements) were the ones that made women hungry to buy more and more, stirring up dissatisfaction with our bodies and lives.

All of this was at a time in 2011 when the print journalism industry as a whole was struggling to survive, and people didn’t know whether print magazines would exist in another decade. Just a year later, then, when a friend told me about Verily magazine, a new independent women’s magazine started by a group of friends in New York with similar values to mine, I was overjoyed and knew I wanted to be a part of the project. I wrote an article for their first print issue, and then worked as a member of the team from 2014 until 2017.

While Verily magazine went out of print and became a digital-only magazine from 2014 until 2023, we have always believed in print magazines as an important cultural force. As our co-founder, Kara Bach, wrote on LeanIn.org in 2013, “Magazines have such a powerful ability to really hold up what is beautiful, desirable, successful, and what it means to be modern women.”

A print magazine should be an object of beauty that can encourage us to slow down and reflect, providing moments of gratitude, attentiveness, nourishment; isn’t this what truly beautiful things always help us to do? This is why I was so thrilled to rejoin the Verily team a few months ago, to be a part of Verily’s mission to fight the objectification of women in word and image and an antidote to the fracturing of our attention and wellbeing with a beautiful and nourishing print magazine.

In our second issue of 2023 (which has just gone to the printers and will be with subscribers soon), we reflect particularly on the theme of “beauty.” This is perhaps where Verily magazine has always been a unique force or positive change in women’s media; when we started out in 2012, we were the first women’s magazine to commit to never using Photoshop to alter the skin and bodies of the women represented in our pages. We believe in showing women at their best, because our desire to be beautiful isn’t a bad impulse, but we also believe beauty is diverse and looks many different ways for different people; your “best” isn’t a work of fiction.

As we come to the close of summer—a season when we often feel even more pressure than usual to look a certain way—we would love to invite you to pause and explore what beauty means to you, and how feeling beautiful can help us reunify our external and internal sense of personhood in a world that is constantly trying to commodify us and divorce beauty from its deeper meaning.

As I write in the latest issue: 

We tend to confuse feeling beautiful with vanity. But vanity is actually rooted in insecurity; what else could prompt us to take selfie after selfie in an effort to get the “perfect” pose, to seek constant validation from others, and to rate and rank beauty (our own and others’) as if we’re in some kind of beauty pageant, scoring points on stage?

The reverse is also true: when you’re rooted in a sense of your own beauty and dignity, you can appreciate someone else’s beauty free from comparison, envy, or insecurity. When you’re in the presence of someone who feels truly at peace with themselves, that peace is infectious; it invites you to relax, to be aware of—and grateful for—your own beauty as well as the beauty in the world around you.

Perhaps feeling truly beautiful doesn’t mean we’re thinking about our appearance more, but in fact, grounded in a deep sense of confidence about our own intrinsic dignity and beauty, we’re free to think about ourselves less.

We can appreciate our beauty in a way that isn’t self-obsessed; we can hold our beauty lightly, knowing it to be truly ours and not something that can be taken away.

You can read the full reflection by becoming an annual subscriber to Verily in print. In this issue, we’re inviting you to think about how beauty can transform your experience of the world with poetry and articles exploring beauty in the home, how to handle envy in friendship, and much more. In our interview with best-selling author Gretchen Rubin, we explore how growing an appreciation for—and awareness of—the five senses can help us elevate our everyday lives and let more beauty and peace into our lives.

At Verily we have always believed in women; we don’t buy the lie that women only want catty celebrity gossip and content that fuels our insecurities by telling us we’re never enough unless we possess or achieve certain things. Print magazines may never be a wildly successful business model (especially the way we do it with very little advertising), but as we return to print as a nonprofit we’re making the counter-cultural statement that women aren’t objects to be consumed or products to be squeezed for profit. Instead, we are working to serve women with media that nurtures authentic community and wellbeing.

Make sure to order your copy of our latest issue or become a subscriber to our beautiful quarterly print magazine that invites you to come home to yourself as we live out the ethos of our motto in everything we create for you: less of who you should be, more of who you are.

With our warmest wishes,

Sophie & the Verily team