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How I Went From Ugly Teen To Stunning Beauty

A friend of mine recently sent me a Facebook message telling me I may be misleading my readers.

“Misleading?” I asked. “How so?”

“I ask you not to take offense, but you do not mention to your readers that you have a great apartment (for the more shallow girls you take home) and that you have amazing blue eyes (kind of a huge turn on for women). It gives you a bit of an advantage over the average guy let alone geek.”

We ended up having a very interesting back-and-forth conversation, and I’m extremely grateful to her for having brought this matter up. To this day, I still maintain that grooming is way more important than looks. Check out Neil Strauss’s before and after makeover pics, side by side.

Crazy, isn’t it? I’ve already given you guys brief style tips, but I guess there’s still a lot of disbelief about how we can all look better.

As such, I’ve decided to show you guys the overall evolution of my looks over the years. In a pictorial adventure.

In Which I Make A Fool Of Myself…

For those of you that have no idea what I look like, here’s a quick pic taken with my MacBook. This is how I looked a mere two hours before publishing this article.

I know, right? Devilishly handsome. But here’s one where I’m smiling instead of duckfacing and pointing upwards like an idiot while giving you my best deathstare.

Wow. Now that’s beauty. Notice how the screen automatically generated hearts and a halo. Yea, that’s how much I turned it on.

But I wasn’t always this gorgeous. To show you, my loyal fans and readers, how much I care, I’m going to humiliate myself and post a picture of myself at the tender age of 14. Ready?

BEHOLD!

Yea. Not so proud of that look. Why do I still have that picture? The only reason anyone has a picture of themselves at 14: the female parental unit, also known as “mom”.

A couple of years later, I hit this phase.

Good thing I realized those spikes weren’t working for me. But we’ve still got a long way to go.

Years Go By

When I moved to France, I decided to do something about my acne. That something ended up being 9 months of taking Acutane, a horrible (now-illegal-in-certain-countries) pill that messes with your liver, and dries you up like a raisin. I was forced to wear sunblock every time I went outside, was addicted to chapstick, and had the nastiest dandruff you’ve ever seen.

However, when all was said and done, I looked like this. Note that there’s a five year gap between this and the last pic, simply because I couldn’t find one in between.

Uncertain if there’s an improvement I’d say. The extra weight helped though, all 20 pounds of it. The hair was definitely no bueno, so I got that cut at some point and turned into this.

Time marches on, and as I did Kung Fu, and put on more weight, I began to look sexier and sexier.

The ladies kept telling me the same thing though.

“Rami, you have such pretty eyes, why don’t you wear contacts?”

Sigh.

I tried, but my eyes would itch like hell, and I never enjoyed myself when they were on. I was always too busy applying eye drops and blinking and scratching…

In 2008, after realizing I was doing myself a disservice by hiding my eyes, I decided to take a drastic step and get laser eyeball surgery. 5 days after my operation, I looked like this.

Finally! My eyes were available to the world.

No joke, it made a huge difference. Emphasizing your best feature will always get you farther in the looks department.

However, I still needed to make one last change. At 5 ft 8, I was a strange mix of skinny fat, with a bit of a belly, but no muscle anywhere else. Just skin and bones.

Rather than resigning myself to this fact, I eventually decided to get in shape. I hit the gym 3 days a week, and ate like a horse, following the strict regimen assigned by my personal trainer, drill sergeant, and sadist Jon Lemieux. That was the last big change I made, before looking like the gorgeous man you see before you today.

And there you have it. My journey from ugly teen to stunning beauty and future male model.

To my friend who claimed I was stunningly beautiful: thanks! I really appreciate it. But I had to experiment for years with the right look, and different configurations, as well as go through pills, laser eye surgery, the gym, and many clothing and hair make-overs, until I looked this good.

And I am a lazy mofo, which means if I can do it, so can you.

Here’s a great quote from The 40 Year Old Virgin that sums it up about right.

Andy: You seem really well-groomed and really put together.

Jay: I mean, look, dude. You think this was an accident? All of this right here? Premeditated, partner. You gotta highlight your attributes, like a diamond in the rough. You willing to make some sacrifices?

What he said. Get out there, highlight your attributes, and make some sacrifices. I’m pretty sure you’ll be more buff, more tan, taller, handsomer, and better than me in nearly every way. No guarantees that you’ll have sparkling and hypnotic blue eyes like mine though.

UPDATE: Nearly two years after writing this post, I added a picture of me with a beard. This was taken a few months before my 30th birthday.

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What do you think? Can grooming compete with straight up good looks?

More importantly, should I have stuck to the spiky hair and glasses?

32 comments add your comment

  1. I think this might be the best post you’ve ever written! LOVE IT. Good work. Make sure all new readers get to see it. Put it on your site bar or something!

    • Thanks man! Sometimes having guts means showing people the worst of me, hoping it’ll bring out the best in them.
      See how I did that? 😀

  2. Rami – I love this whole transformation post!

    I recently found 2 pics of myself from 5th and 6th grade – OMG, I was such a little dork! I need to find more pics, I was thinking of doing a similar post, but for what reason yet, I am not sure!

    I happen to like the pic of you that says “sticks and stones” Its cute 🙂

    And its great that you learned how to highlight your attributes, and that you did it means you can really understand how to help others change what they want/need to change, you get the whole process! 😀

    <3 Emily Rose

    • Thanks Emily! It all began with a comment and an old pic of me.

      And I do know what works for most guys and what doesn’t. It’s a skill I picked up from my sister, who is a huge fashionista. You should totally do the pics of yourself in a post, it’s a lot of fun.

  3. Yup you’ve changed over the years rambo ! Still doesn’t beat my natural good looks tho 😉 Love you man !!!

  4. Love this post! Well done Rambo 🙂 I liked you when you were a teen 😉 you were the best geek ever.

  5. You should stick with the beard your chin isn’t your best feature. Grooming, excercise, and a healthy diet is essential to anyone’s good looks, if only more people would figure that out instead of acting victimized for their acne or frizzy hair.

  6. Seriously, I mean you were very ugly as a teen but its not like you transformed into a model. You just changed from ugly to slightly below average. You went from a 2/10 to a 4.5/10. You aren’t good looking at all and your post is just you purely being a narcissistic and inflating your looks.

    • 4.5? Damn man, that’s great! I knew I was beautiful before, but now that you’ve given me such a high score, I should change it to GORGEOUS.

    • 4.5 is a low score since it is out of 10. That means you are below the average looking guy. Despite how hard you try you are stuck with what you got. What brings it down is you ugly eyebrows, your scrunched up face, caved in eyes plus the fact that you look like a geek. Your body from the first pic shows that you are not fit and that you are chubby and kinda fat. If we throw in you personality you go down a lot lower. You are a narcissistic and a scumbag at the very most. Its people like you that screw up the gene pool

    • No no please, try not to give me too many compliments at once, or I’ll start to think I’m too pretty for this conversation.

    • Trying to respond to insults with passive aggressive sarcasm, are common traits of a beta male. This makes you look weak. If you are trying to appear smart or clever its not working and its only making you look more stupid.

    • I gotta say one last thing, when you get into an argument with people you will get 3 types of reactions.
      1. It pisses them off to no end and they attack you
      2. They see exactly what you are doing and call you out on it
      3. They play your own game against you.
      One day you will meet that #1 guy and he will surely fuck you up.

    • Oh shit bro I was going to respond but I was busy writing a blog post about the top ten trolls in my comments section. Congrats you made number 1!

      Tell all your friends your mom would be so proud.

    • While It may sound like im trolling you everythining I have said so far is a true fact indeed. Not all criticism is trolling, it is a genuine legitamate true statement that has been made.

  7. You were very ugly as a teen and now you are slightly ugly as an adult. Not something to be very proud of.

    • I know you commented this years ago, but if you’ve got problems in your life, venting it out on strangers isn’t the way to go about things.

  8. ever hear the term narcissistic because that is exactly what you are. I mean it would be a different story if you are right but you are wrong and u still ugly

  9. How can you do a top ten trolls list when you arent popular what so ever and you only have 10 people total commenting on your shit post

    • Oh man that was a fast reply. I can’t keep up with you, which made me realize something important.

      If you don’t like me and still read and comment on all my stuff, bitch you are a FAN!

      Thanks so much for being my biggest fan, I really appreciate it.

  10. I was a cute little kid but the older I got the uglier I became. I went downhill starting at 8, when my new front teeth grew in with a gap so big that it looked like a missing tooth. I developed early but my breasts never grew past mosquito bite size. None of my facial features worked together as I lost my childish looks. The only thing I had going for me was that I wasn’t fat. I was bullied in school non stop and my ugliness didn’t help. The bullying at school only made me care less about my appearance. I wore baggy boys clothes, all dark, from 12 to 15 and pulled my hair back into ponytails and buns so much that the sides, front and back broke off and stuck up. I did not want to wear makeup (still don’t like most makeup) and when I did it made my skin worse. When the bullying eased up because I changed schools, I did wear better clothing and got my braces off. I started to grow into my facial features slowly but my hair was still the worst. Still, I cringe less at photos of me at 16 than at 13 or 14. All of the teens of the “Am I Ugly” reddit look ten times more attractive than I did.

    Now at 27, I look probably average. I’m not a classic beauty and I’m still not super girly but despite being lazy as fuck, I’m no longer ugly despite making minimal efforts. I’m sure I could have tried harder to look better back then but I had a lot of other stuff going on. Interesting enough, a lot of the girls who were very attractive at 13 are now aging prematurely, gained a ton of weight

    • you seem exactly like the guy that just posted. Ugly as fuck as a teen and then just plain looking or slightly below average as an adult.

  11. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder Ethan. You may think he’s below average in every aspect, but there’s people out there that would die to look like him.

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