Veteran actor Zeenat Aman recently opened up about her struggles to fully embrace her physicality during the early days of her career. She said that she never found herself to be beautiful despite winning beauty pageants and being widely called as the “sex symbol”.
Taking to Instagram, Zeenat shared an old photo of hers and wrote a long note explaining her relationship with beauty. “Sometimes I see an old picture of myself and think “you weren’t a bad looking girl, Ms. Aman!”. Now if I happen to say these words out loud, I am usually met with an annoyed groan and a dramatic roll of the eyes from whichever of the three millennials whose company I keep happen to be around,” she said.
She added, “It’s true though, I never found myself to be beautiful, but I did learn to accept that other people did. I recently heard the term “pretty privilege”, and goodness did I make use of mine! The world can be a cold place, and I learnt early in life to leverage every advantage I have to survive it. It reads hideously self-indulgent to state such a thing. Afterall, I won a beauty pageant, was cast as a leading lady by the country’s most venerated directors, and was widely hailed as a “sex symbol”. So I can’t quite say why I was unable to fully embrace my physicality.”
Zeenat then went on to explain why she never felt comfortable with her physicality. “Perhaps one got more wrapped up in the performance of beauty than the feeling of beauty. Or perhaps such public emphasis on one’s looks depleted one’s emotional self-worth. Or maybe I feared becoming arrogant, and felt it far too vain and indulgent to consider myself beautiful. Most likely it’s a combination of all these things and then some,” she wrote.
The actor said that physical beauty is meaningless without self-validation. “So, if you want to truly feel beautiful - step out of your mind, and look at yourself from the perspective of someone who loves you. Hopefully then you will see your own light and realise that no cream, collagen or facelift can compete with the lens of love and acceptance,” she concluded the post.
Zeenat is known for starring in films like, Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), Yaadon Ki Baarat (1973), Roti Kapada Aur Makaan (1974), Dharam Veer (1977) and Don (1978) among others. She recently made her comeback with the Netflix series, The Royals, which came out on the platform earlier this year.
