Years before I had an instagram account I had a Yelp account and I must admit that my very first review was a terrible 1 star review. While I think honest good and bad experiences are valuable on review sites I realized that’s not the person I wanted to be. Instead of only putting negative thoughts into the world I challenged myself that for every negative review to take the time to write five positive reviews. Soon I found myself gushing over businesses I love and writing reviews of businesses I was trying for the first time. Within a few months I was invited to join the Elite squad – now I have over 250 reviews and have reached gold elite status – this means I’ve been on the squad for five years.
As much as I enjoy sharing reviews I enjoy reading them. I’m a planner and researcher by nature so before I go anywhere I want to know as much as possible. For example, when we go out to California we’re going to have tea at the Hello Kitty Grand Café – I have read every single review posted on their page so I know going in what I want to order and what fun photo ops I want to get.
Blogger Life can sometimes be all about that photo op
But back to blogging – my approach is very similar. When I write yelp reviews I talk about the things I want to know and I always use value in my rating consideration. For example, I had a great dinner at a local restaurant but it was $100 per person; while everything was good and we had a nice time I thought it was a little overpriced so I gave a four start rating instead of five. Likewise you may have noticed I always discuss price and value on this blog.
When I first started using instagram I used it much like a review site – oh, Old Navy has a shirt I like . . . .let me search their hashtag and find someone closer to my size wearing it and see how it looks on them. And man y’all, was I disappointed. I don’t have the actual data but I’d say for every 100 fashion posts I see on the gram maybe two will have a plus size woman, and honestly maybe five will have a woman over size 10. I don’t get it – over 1/2 of women in America wear a size 14 or higher but where are they? I do follow a lot of the big name plus size bloggers but where are my every day gals? So to be 100% frank – I blog because I get tired of seeing a feed full of RSBs (Rich Skinny Blondes).
Not a RSB and not sorry
I don’t want this post to come off like I’m jealous. Blonde hair is just a dye job away; I have nothing to complain about financially and I don’t begrudge anyone for having more but nor does their more make me unsatisfied with what I have. I will never be “skinny” – the smallest I have ever been in my life was a size 10; and that’s when I was 18, running every single day and eating only apples during the day and a small dinner at night – skinny is just not my body’s natural state of being and I’m ok with that. I’m really upset with whoever came up with the phrase “real women have curves” – bashing anyone to make yourself look good is never ok. Models are real women, celebrities are real women , RSBs are real women . . . but they aren’t the only women and at the end of the day I’d just like to see the demographics of the images I see everyday be more in line with the demographics of our world.
The majority of my pictures are going to be of me, wearing the actual outfit I wore the day the picture was taken talking about where I wore it and why – because that’s the kind of content I was to see from others. I’ve gone through phases where I only posted staged photos and I always styled my hair before shooting looks but I found it stressful to keep up with. Some bloggers really enjoy creating stylized shoots and those are really fun to look at and I love to see how fun and creative some ladies can be but my why, my message to the world is that fashion its for everyday life and EVERYONE is worthy of wearing what makes them feel fabulous.
I totally stumbled upon this setup – completely unplanned photo and not my best hair day
I’m not immune to the comparison that social media can suck one into – why is she getting more likes than me, I don’t look cute enough, ugh my hair is frizzy I can’t post that. But I do – because you know what some days my hair is frizzy, some days I’m not wearing the most fabulous outfit I own and some days my makeup looks terrible. The funny thing is though sometimes those real photos are the ones that y’all like the most. So why do I blog? I blog because I am just of worthy of my space in the world as anyone else and maybe if I say it enough it will reach someone else who needs to know that they too are worthy.
