Hareem Farooq wants you to love yourself — all of yourself
Actor Hareem Farooq has a special message for her fans: be good to yourselves and to others, because that is what it means to be beautiful.
In an Instagram post shared on Sunday, she rejected the notion that beauty lies in people’s physical appearances and argued that true beauty lies in how people choose to conduct themselves in their lives.
Farooq said “stretch marks, acne marks, hair loss, weight gain,” can determine neither a person’s beauty, nor their worth. Human bodies, she said, change with time, stress, trauma, and illness, and patriarchal beauty standards convince women they need to fit into a pre-made box.
The actor said someone’s “deepest beauty” lives in things like “the love you carry in your heart, the intelligence of your mind, the purity of your soul, the glimmer of hope in your eyes, the way you face adversity, the desire to always do and be better than yesterday,” and so much else.
She made her instructions crystal clear — “You do you. Own yourself. You’ll glow inside and out.”
Farooq asked her followers to accept, honour and embrace the physical bodies that have carried them through adversity after adversity.
“Be grateful for [your body]. Be gentle with it. Carry it towards health with gratitude being your best friend,” the actor advised.
Farooq asked people to live their own lives and let others live theirs because “[someone’s] body is not a public debate, a cautionary tale or an invitation for commentary”.
“Let everybody exist without needing permission. Let people dress, age, change, heal and take up space without being measured against someone else’s standards.”
The actor said people need to “break the cycle” with their thoughts and actions. She advised them to “be unapologetically yourself and make room for everyone else to do the same”.
While her message is sure to resonate with many, this isn’t the first time Farooq has spoken up about people shaming others for their physical appearances. In 2024, she spoke about her role in the show Bismil and how she decided not to go on a crash diet to lose weight for it.
She’s also been on the receiving end of body shaming, with one notable incident from 2021 seeing the actor face a distasteful joke made by Faryal Mehmood on TV.
Farooq has, in the past, also talked about her journey with keeping healthy and how it can be a worthwhile challenge for someone to take on.
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