Girl gave up hiding acne face with thick makeup to show real self

2018-01-04 13:29 Last Updated At：16:48

When girls try desperately to cover any tiny blemish on their faces, this brave teenager shows her face full of acne, without makeup!

'It doesn't mean you can't be successful, it doesn't mean you can't be glamorous. Beauty is so much more than your face.'

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She used makeup to hide her acne.

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She used makeup to hide her acne.

A US teenage girl said when she talked about cystic acne on her face. Hailey Wait, 17, has been plagued by skin problems since 11.

Hailey used to apply a thick layer of makeup to hide the red blemishes unless she would feel unconfident and insecure.

'I had a lot of people at school... give me dirty looks. They'd call me "pizza face" - you know, those generic acne terms.' She said.

Hailey also described the painful experience with her acne: 'Every time you bump into it or barely touch it or something it feels like your face is on fire.It was too painful. I remember one night crying in my bed because I was just in so much pain.'

The acne also hurt her mentally, she said: 'When my acne was at its worst I just felt like I was gross. It was red and splotchy and I just felt like a garbage can. I felt disgusting.'

But in recent months, Hailey decided to let her face breathe and stopped wearing makeup.

'I stopped wearing it because I just noticed it wasn't doing anything for me. It was only hiding me and I felt like every time I walked out of the door I wasn't being myself.

'I feel like I have embraced my acne by not hiding it anymore, and [now I] just kind of be real with myself and real with other people.'

Hailey even shared her bare-face selfies and her stories on social media, causing negative comments at first.

'I would get a lot of comments telling me to clean my face - as if I wasn't already doing that - and I would get loads and loads of acne advice, even though I never asked.

But as time goes by, Hailey's act prompted positive effects: 'I feel like I have influenced a lot of people that have insecurities in general by setting an example and showing that it's not the end of the world if you don't have the perfect skin.'

The acne blogger says she plans to keep daily bare face without cover up, and will only apply one on special occasions.

'I hope my story regarding acne really helps people to realise that just because you have these imperfections doesn't mean you are not amazing.'

A month-old girl is pulled from the rubble in Gaza after an airstrike killed her parents

2025-03-20 23:16 Last Updated At：23:21

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — As rescuers dug through the remains of a collapsed apartment building in Gaza’s Khan Younis on Thursday, they could hear the cries of a baby from underneath the rubble.

Suddenly, calls of “God is great” rang out. A man sprinted away from the wreckage carrying a living infant swaddled in a blanket and handed her to a waiting ambulance crew. The baby girl stirred fitfully as paramedics checked her over.

Her parents and brother were dead in the overnight Israeli airstrike.

“When we asked people, they said she is a month old and she has been under the rubble, since dawn,” said Hazen Attar, a civil defense first responder. “She had been screaming and then falling silent from time to time until we were able to get her out a short while ago, and thank God she is safe.”

The girl was identified as Ella Osama Abu Dagga. She had been born 25 days earlier, in the midst of a tenuous ceasefire that many Palestinians in Gaza had hoped would mark the end of a war that has devastated the enclave, killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly its entire population.

Only the girl's grandparents survived the attack. Killed were her brother, mother and father, along with another family that included a father and his seven children. Rescuers digging through the rubble could be seen pulling out the small body of a child sprawled on the mattress where he had been sleeping.

The girl's grandmother, Fatima Abu Dagga, sat with a group of other women in a relative's house Thursday, taking turns cradling the infant. Her sons and their wives and eight grandchildren died in the bombing, and only the baby survived. She wept over the loss, and the return to the devastation of war.

“We weren’t really living in a truce," she said. "We knew that at any moment the war might return. We never felt that there was stability, not at all.”

Israel resumed heavy strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, shattering the truce that had facilitated the release of more than two dozen hostages. Israel blamed the renewed fighting on Hamas because the militant group rejected a new proposal for the second phase of the ceasefire that departed from their signed agreement, which was mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.

Nearly 600 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including more than 400 on Tuesday alone, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Health officials said most of the victims were women and children.

The strike that destroyed the infant girl’s home hit Abasan al-Kabira, a village just outside of Khan Younis near the border with Israel, killing at least 16 people, mostly women and children, according to the nearby European Hospital, which received the dead.

It was inside an area the Israeli military ordered evacuated earlier this week, encompassing most of eastern Gaza.

Nabil Abu Dagga, a relative of Ella's family who lives nearby, rushed to the scene of the strike.

“People were sitting together and enjoying themselves on a Ramadan night, staying up together as a family,” he said. “... No one was expecting it and no one would imagine that a human could kill another human in this way.”

He and others started pulling out bodies. Then they heard the baby girl's cries.

The Israel military says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it is deeply embedded in residential areas. The military did not immediately comment on the overnight strikes.

Hours later, the Israeli military restored a blockade on northern Gaza, including Gaza City, that it had maintained for most of the war, but which had been lifted under the ceasefire deal.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had returned to what remains of their homes in the north after a ceasefire took hold in January.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.

Israel’s blistering retaliatory air and ground offensive has killed nearly 49,000 Palestinians since then, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It does not say how many were militants. Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence.

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Associated Press staff writer Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed to this report.