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IN TOUCH – Self-Confidence

TX:Ìý 10.05.2022Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý FERN LULHAM

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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Lulham

Good evening.Ìý Tonight, blindness, beauty and confidence – we talk to a visually impaired counsellor about how being blind can affect your self-esteem.

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Clip

Somebody might have seen that somebody that’s completely blind might have less confidence or a lower self-esteem than somebody that’s got relatively good eyesight but that’s often not the case at all.

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Lulham

More on that later.

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But first, applying beauty products, such as skincare and haircare, with little or no sight can be quite a challenge to say the least.Ìý Issues like inaccessible packaging and websites can sometimes make selecting the right products pretty tough too.Ìý So, have blind people been ignored by the industry or is there hope that attitudes towards accessibility are getting a makeover?Ìý

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Well, we decided to take a closer look.Ìý Emily Davison creates fashion and beauty content online where she’s known under the name Fashioneyesta.Ìý Here she is on her YouTube channel sharing some tricks on how to apply makeup when you’re blind.

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Fashioneyesta clip

Now today I’m going to be using my beloved classic naked pallet.Ìý First of all, I’m going to take the outer crease brush, this is when I can’t see what I’m doing so I just have to go by feel.Ìý And what I would say for this one is that you start from the inner corner of your eye, towards your nose, and then just blend it outwards.

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One thing I would say with this is to be quite confident in knowing where your eyes are, just to make sure that you don’t get any fallout afterwards.

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Lulham

Ah yes, I’ve had lots of fallouts after doing my makeup but I’m not necessarily sure that I can blame my eyeshadow entirely for those.

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So, Emily, one view that we see quite often on social media is that some people say they don’t understand why, if you’re blind or visually impaired, you would want to use beauty products.Ìý What do you say to that?

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Davison

I would say that the idea that beauty is just about how you look, I think is quite singular.Ìý I thought a lot of us also want to feel good about ourselves and feeling good about ourselves encompasses lots of different things and I also would say that a lot of people with visual impairments, as well, do want to present themselves well to the world.Ìý We all deserve to want to feel good about ourselves in life.Ìý

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Lulham

And how do you feel about going into stores to select beauty products, as someone with a visual impairment?

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Davison

I, to be honest, see it as a bit of a mission sometimes.Ìý I tend to go into stores – if I’m shopping on my own – it will only be if I know what I want, if I’ve had time to research it online and I’ve got an idea of what shades would look good on me or if I’ve used something before and I’m just repurchasing it because often I think that going into store, there’s so many colours, there’s so much in the way of products, there’s not a lot in the way of accessible means to be able to shop independently and it just becomes a bit of a minefield.Ìý And often, if I’m on my own, you will find me Face Timing my mother and she’s trying to say to me – pan around slowly and I’ll tell you what to try on – and stuff like that, if I’m not with her.

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Lulham

So, what are some of the main issues that you find in terms of accessibility of beauty products?

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Davison

One of the main issues that I personally encounter a lot is the packaging of products.Ìý So, often the print is very small, the print is not a very distinctive font, they’re not very easy to read, the ingredients are very small to read.Ìý A lot of the time you won’t find the means of being able to quickly and easily find what you want, for example, with things like maybe a QR code or something like that.Ìý Also, things like trying to distinguish different shades.Ìý So, often the packaging’s the same, there’s not everything to differentiate – okay well this is a matt kind of lipstick, this is more of a shimmer.Ìý And it just becomes a bit meaningless when you’ve got bottles that are all the same shape, all the same colour, all the same kind of finish.Ìý I think it just makes me feel, as a person, as a consumer, as a customer, that I don’t count, that I don’t have valid reasons to be made included.Ìý And it’s not a nice feeling.Ìý

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Lulham

So, what improvements would you like to see the industry make in this area?

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Davison

I would like to see the industry focus on universal ways to be able to make their packaging and their products more accessible with things like raised QR codes, with collaborating with brands like NaviLens on making a more accessible shopping experience and to just see more collaborative work with brands who are doing great things to make their products more accessible for everyone.

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Lulham

And speaking of brands, if someone from a beauty brand was listening now, what would you say to them about accessibility?

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Davison

I would say there is such a huge percentage of people in the population who are disabled – 15% of the world’s population have a disability – that’s a huge demographic.Ìý The disability community is actually the largest minority group in the world, the largest, and yet I feel that we are the group that often doesn’t get catered to enough for our variety of needs.Ìý I have been a blogger since 2012, I have seen improvements but frankly, I haven’t seen enough and I think it’s time for that to change.

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Lulham

Emily Davison there.

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Well, Emily, you’re in luck as we have somebody from one of the biggest brands in the world listening intently to what you’ve said.Ìý Sam Latif is the accessibility leader at Proctor & Gamble, a multinational company, whose brands include Gillet, Olay, Oral-B, Herbal Essences, Pantene and so many more.Ìý

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Sam, I believe you’ve been with Proctor & Gamble for over 20 years now in various guises but tell us how your current role came about.

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Latif

Good evening, everyone.Ìý So, yeah, my current role came about five years ago.Ìý Previous to that I was working in IT at Proctor & Gamble.Ìý Like Emily was saying, I also felt that many of the products that I was using from P&G, they were not designed for someone like me – I’m also blind as well – and I realised that as a mum, as a woman who was highly interested in beauty care products that the products that my company were creating were not inclusive for people like me and my community of people with disabilities.Ìý So, I decided to bring this to the attention of the company through what I call the Disability Challenge.Ìý And I got people throughout the company, including senior leadership and eventually even the CEO, to experience what it was like to tell the difference between a shampoo and a conditioner bottle when you can’t see properly so I gave them glasses that would simulate sight loss, just to give them an understanding of the simple tasks that able-bodied people take for granted.

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Lulham

So, what changes have you been able to make as accessibility leader?

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Latif

What we have done is brought some products to market.Ìý So, what Emily was saying earlier, it’s really hard to distinguish what’s in products, bottles feel the same.Ìý So, we’re introducing a tactile language to help people identify, for example, shampoo from conditioner because we’re putting tactile symbols for shampoo, which happens to be four tactile stripes for shampoo, is for shampoo is four stripes.Ìý And then we’ve got some tactile circles for conditioner.Ìý And so, as we’re creating new products of shampoo and conditioner we will be building in the tactile stripes and circles.Ìý

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One of the examples that I’m really proud of at the moment is on our Pantene Miracles brand, we have introduced NaviLens on the product, which means that people will be able to go into the store and a blind person will be guided, so it will say left, right, up, down and when you’re exactly in range of the product it will start going beep, beep, beep, beep… and help you find and lift the product off the shelf independently, which is absolutely fantastic.Ìý For the same initiative, we are making sure that our advertising is accessible with audio description and captioning.Ìý And finally, the icing on the cake, is that our brand ambassador is blind herself.

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Advert clip

Hi, I’m Lucy Edwards.Ìý Being blind means that I see through touch.Ìý When my hair feels straw like and it makes that annoying sound, it really gets to me because great hair is not just about how it looks to the world, it’s how it feels to me.Ìý Pantene, proud partners of NaviLens, empowering the visually impaired…

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Lulham

Well, that all sounds like really great news from an accessibility point of view but won’t these things add to the cost of your products?

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Latif

Well, first of all, some of these things, if we do it right, then it shouldn’t add too much cost.Ìý And secondly, the cost outweighs the number of people that we’ll be serving.Ìý It’s only when you try to retrospectively go back and fix something, that’s when the high costs come along.Ìý So, if you’re smart about accessibility bake it in from the beginning.

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Lulham

You’re obviously a huge beauty lover yourself, Sam, do you use any kind of tech to assist in your beauty routine or even just to select the products you’re buying in the first place?

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Latif

Oh yes, I use a lot of tech but I use a lot of people as well.Ìý I call them my talking mirrors.Ìý Like Emily was talking about her mum, I also have my sister, my cousins, like trusted advisors, who make sure to pick out the right colours etc. for me.Ìý I also use apps like Be My Eyes or Aira, who can actually help to connect me to a human being on the other side of a phone, through a video call, and help me confirm that my makeup’s on okay.Ìý Technology has really helped to make me more independent and confident with my beauty regime.

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Lulham

And finally, Sam, what more do you think needs to be done either within or outside the industry to make beauty products more accessible?

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Latif

I think the beauty industry needs to wake up and recognise that today the industry is not accessible.Ìý From what I see, when I speak externally, when I meet other people from the industry, they realise that – oh my god, we had intentionally excluded this community, we didn’t know.Ìý But now people are waking up and taking account and actually acting to make products more accessible.

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Lulham

Sam Latif from Proctor & Gamble, thank you very much indeed.

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Now, the use of beauty products can be one way of boosting our confidence but what other factors can affect confidence if you’re visually impaired?Ìý Well, someone well placed to answer that question is David Best.Ìý David, who’s visually impaired himself, has an honours degree in humanistic counselling and has provided counselling support to blind and visually impaired people for over 20 years.Ìý I spoke to him about the kinds of issues surrounding confidence that he commonly hears about from his visually impaired clients.

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Best

I guess it depends on the age group.Ìý Confidence is about their belief in their ability to do something or not do something.Ìý And so, with children, the typical kinds of things will be how they view themselves in relation to other people.Ìý They might, at some stage, realise that they can’t do something as well as other people can and so they then might feel left out. ÌýSo, that can really have an impact on their self-esteem.Ìý

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One of the most common difficulties, I think, especially young people have sort of emotionally, is the challenge of do I make it visible to other people that I’m visually impaired.Ìý Obviously, having a white cane, whether it's a symbol cane or a long cane, they can really, really help in a practical way but the other side of that is that the person using it will often worry about how other people see them.Ìý And this is something that I went through, myself, and it took me years and years – I mean I used to worry so much about people looking at me.Ìý And the reality is that people do look at other people but after a second, they’ve forgotten.Ìý If you’re walking down the road and you really do need a cane and you haven’t got one because you’re worried and then you walk into a lamppost or you go to open a shop door, which is something I commonly used to do, I’d be feeling around the glass trying to find the door and people are looking at me, thinking, wow that’s a strange guy, what’s he doing.Ìý It really is embarrassing.Ìý But if you’ve got a cane people immediately see the cane and go – oh, okay, that’s why.Ìý

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Another thing that I commonly do is if I walk into a room and there’s people in there, even if I know them, I can’t see who they are, unless I hear them speak I’ll never know and I’ve made so many mistakes before, thinking I’m talking to somebody I’m not.Ìý There’s countless small things like that that you encounter everyday that can really have a negative effect on you.Ìý Things that people wouldn’t even think about.

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Lulham

Do you think some people might feel that they need to over-compensate for their visual impairment in other ways in an attempt to make themselves more valued by others?

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Best

Yeah, that can be in terms of people’s attitudes or it could be in terms of their physical appearance.Ìý I mean people pleasing is something that’s very common and perfectionism – and you know perfectionism is such a barrier.Ìý So, if you have false expectations of yourself or other people then there’s so much room for disappointment.Ìý One of the things I try to do in my work is encourage people to include themselves more because a lot of people, especially when they doubt themselves, they wait for other people to do things or include them or invite them, actually you have to kind of count yourself in, you have to include yourself and learn how to do that and that can be really quite difficult to do.Ìý The visual world, there are lots of cues that people respond to, so just even things like eye contact, body language, very subtle things people that are visual will pick up on and so it’s easier to know how to include yourself, I suppose, in that sense.Ìý It takes a lot of courage.

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Lulham

In what ways might sudden sight loss affect a person’s sense of identity and in turn their confidence?

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Best

Well, I guess if you’re born with a visual impairment, you don’t necessarily know any different from it.Ìý I mean obviously people have visual impairments that get progressively worse but, again, often there’s the ability to adjust as a situation changes, even thought that’s not easy for most people.Ìý But somebody who, all of a sudden, loses their sight, even if it’s expected, that’s a massive shock, there’s no amount of preparation really.Ìý Having said that, with support and with encouraging people around and with time, people largely can recover from those things and actually find a new identity.Ìý And I think the fear of the unknown is the thing that really gets people, especially initially – how am I going to cope without my sight.

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Lulham

As blind people at some point we are likely to find ourselves in situations such as access refusals or needing special accommodation where we will need confidence to speak up for ourselves, do you have any practical strategies or tips to help in that kind of scenario?

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Best

Well, I think we tend to ask for permission.Ìý I would say it’s about taking control of the situation and being as assertive as possible, saying this is what I need rather than can I have or would it be possible if.Ìý I mean, obviously, it’s polite to ask in certain kinds of ways.Ìý Take control, the best you can of the situation.Ìý A bit like using a guide dog or white cane thing, by using it you’re taking control, you’re owning the situation.Ìý One of the things that comes up for people often is the issue of dependence and independence and I used to think that to be independent meant I had to do everything on my own.Ìý And so an example would be, I’d go into a shop and I’d be spending ages in there, squinting over all of the different products and then I’d be getting more and more frustrated.Ìý Eventually, I’d go and ask and say – Oh, can you help me please, I’m visually impaired.Ìý And then what I realised, in the end, is, do you know what, the best thing to do is go in the shop, go straight up to the shop assistant and say – can you help me please, I’m visually impaired, this is what I’m after.Ìý You’re taking control and you are asking for help and there’s nothing wrong with asking for help and, in fact, recognising your limitation and knowing when to ask is all part of being independent, it builds up your confidence and your self-esteem.

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Lulham

So, what would you say to someone, David, who feels that their visual impairment has had an impact on their confidence, what words of advice can you give them?

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Best

Well, I think, it’s really important to acknowledge the emotional impact.Ìý Sometimes you have to go through a situation to come out the other side of it and feel stronger.Ìý A lot of people, they don’t like to have a cry, for instance, or they think there’s something wrong with feeling angry but there’s nothing wrong with crying or feeling angry, it’s a really valid and important emotion that we have.Ìý I would encourage people to talk, a lot of people they don’t feel they can share with their close friends or family members because they don’t want to burden them or they don’t want them to feel guilty.Ìý For example, a child might not want to talk to their parent about their visual impairment and how it feels because they don’t want the parent to feel burdened or to blame themselves for it, so they keep it to themselves.Ìý So, get all your thoughts and feelings out in the open and explore them and make sense of them.Ìý Everyone has their own story but putting it out there, letting other people know that, yeah, there are people that are different but it doesn’t make them less or more important than anybody else.Ìý It’s great that visually impaired people, for example, can talk to other visually impaired people who will understand but if we don’t talk to other people, how are they going to understand.Ìý Somebody might assume that somebody that’s completely blind might have less confidence or a lower self-esteem than somebody that’s got relatively good eyesight but that’s often not the case at all.

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Lulham

That was David Best.

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And that’s it for today.Ìý We’d love to hear your experiences relating to what you’ve heard on tonight’s programme.Ìý How has visual impairment affected your confidence?Ìý You can email us intouch@bbc.co.uk, leave your voice mails on 0161 8361338.Ìý From me, Fern Lulham, producer Beth Hemmings and studio managers Carwyn Griffith and Philip Halliwell, goodbye.

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