Around the age of 17, I confided in a member of staff at my school that I wasn’t feeling too great about myself. I reeled off my typical teenage woes that finished with “… and I don’t think I’m all that pretty.” I waited for the protests of reassurance that usually came as a response to such a remark. Instead, came her blunt reply: “No baby, you aren’t.”

Part of me was taken aback, but another part felt reassured by her honesty. At least someone finally confirmed what I’d been thinking all this time. “Look, if I said you were pretty you’d know I was bullshitting you,” she continued in a low voice. “But you’re not ugly. You’re just not pretty.” To demonstrate her point, she put on a fake smile, turned her eyes upwards and exaggeratedly fluttered her eyelashes. I got what she meant. I wasn’t hideous but I didn’t fit the conventional standards of what “pretty” meant (at least in the early 2000s).

Once I discovered makeup, I learnt that I could be striking – if not beautiful. Lining my eyes along the waterline (it was the grunge era after all) in inky black to match my hair and swapping my glasses for contact lenses, the attention I received was positive (“Wow, you’ve really blossomed!”). But at the back of my mind, I still wasn’t sure if I measured up – and I still don’t if I’m honest.

Little girls are raised to believe that beauty is our main currency – which fairytales and popular culture sadly feed into. Many of us are secretly terrified that we might in fact be one of the Ugly Sisters and not Cinderella. Combined with the reality that Jewish women have been told throughout history that we’re unattractive, if we don’t happen to have traditional Anglo-Saxon features.

Given our culture’s fickle attitudes to beauty, it’s tricky for those like myself to work out where we fit in the pecking order. I like to think I’ve evolved past such superficial concerns, but even now I have no idea if someone finds me attractive and I often catch myself glancing in shop windows, not out of vanity, but for reassurance.

But maybe the “truth” about what we look like isn’t as black and white as it seems. I was struck by a comment Jewish lipstick entrepreneur Poppy King made in the Sydney Morning Herald when she recalled how makeup changed her relationship to her looks. “As a child, I thought people might see me as a princess with these big eyes or a witch with my strong nose. Surreptitiously playing dress-ups with red lipstick I realised I don’t have to be either.”

While there are generally accepted ideas of what is or isn’t pretty, beauty is still more or less subjective – and personality will always play a key role. So rather than striving to fit society’s ever-changing attitudes, it’s best to set your own. Sometimes, like Poppy, you just need to stop worrying, put on your lipstick and pull yourself together.