The Imposter in the Room Isn't You
I remember sitting in a classroom at makeup school, surrounded by people twenty years younger than me, half of whom had known that this was what they wanted to do since they were twelve. They'd worked Saturdays on makeup counters. They'd done shifts in salons before they could legally drink. Some of them had YouTube channels with actual followers and could name every influencer in the industry off the top of their head. I had spent seventeen years in a corporate job I'd walked away from, and a catalogue of classic films they'd never seen. In that room, it felt like the wrong kind of currency.
I already had a name for the feeling that gave me. I'd learned it years earlier, in that old corporate job. Over a glass of wine with a male colleague, I told him I sometimes felt like I had imposter syndrome, that I was faking it and was waiting to be caught out. He told me the fact it was called a syndrome proved it wasn't real, just a fashionable name people had put on ordinary self-doubt, and left it there. Case closed, apparently. Not even my problem to fix, because in his version there was nothing there to fix at all. As it turns out the feeling that I was faking it related explicitly to that fact I had been in the wrong job for nearly two decades. It took a pandemic and a dead dad to get me out of there.
I've thought about that conversation a lot since. Partly because of how neatly this colleague shut it down, and partly because of who was doing the shutting. He was a man. Statistically, that's not a coincidence, and it's worth actually looking at why.
Where the phrase comes from
Imposter syndrome was coined in 1978 by two psychologists at Georgia State University, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. Their paper was called The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women and it's worth noting they didn't actually call it a syndrome. They called it a phenomenon. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A syndrome implies something medical, something wrong with you that needs treating. A phenomenon is just something that happens, observed and named, not diagnosed.
Clance and Imes built the paper entirely on conversations with successful women, because that's who kept describing this exact pattern to them: take on a task, feel anxious about it, either overprepare or procrastinate, get it done, feel a flash of relief, then quietly credit the outcome to luck rather than skill. Repeat. It's not in any medical manual. There's no official diagnosis. It's a pattern that got named because so many people recognised themselves in it, and it started life as a study of women specifically, which is exactly why my colleague's dismissive one-liner deserves a second look rather than a shrug.
Is this actually a female thing?
Since 1978, plenty of research has confirmed men experience imposter feelings too, sometimes just as intensely. But it isn't a wash. A large meta-analysis published in 2024, pulling together over 100 studies and more than 40,000 people, found women score consistently higher than men on measures of imposter feelings. The gap isn't enormous, but it's real and it's consistent enough across a huge body of research to matter.
Part of the explanation researchers point to is socialisation rather than anything innate. Clance's later work suggested that boys are more often raised to associate their worth with competence, while girls are more often raised to associate theirs with being liked and being warm. Fast forward to adulthood, and being warm doesn't tend to get you taken seriously in a room where you're already having to prove you belong. That's before you add in whatever industry-specific bias is also present, which is exactly the ground Harvard Business Review writers Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey cover in a widely read 2021 piece, Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. Their argument is that framing this purely as an individual glitch, something to be personally overcome through enough confidence or enough therapy, quietly lets everyone else off the hook. Some of what gets labelled imposter syndrome is a rational response to being in a room that was never built with you in mind.
Our industry adds an odd twist to all this. Hair and makeup is overwhelmingly female and government statistics put the hair and beauty workforce in the UK at around 87% women.
So the usual story of women doubting themselves in male dominated rooms doesn't map cleanly onto an industry built by and for women. What I think actually happens here is that the doubt doesn't come from being outnumbered by men. It comes from other things entirely: age, when you retrained later in life like I did, or a background that doesn't match the traditional route into the industry, or simply comparing yourself to people who started younger and look more comfortable with a roller set than you feel. The bias is still there. It's just wearing different clothes.
The specific freelance flavour of it
Employed people at least get some version of a feedback loop. A manager, an appraisal, a "well done" in a meeting. Freelancers get none of that by default. You finish a job, you don't hear anything, you move on to the next one, and
in the silence your brain fills in the gaps with the worst possible story.
Research into freelance mental health backs this up: isolation is common, benchmarking your own progress against anyone else's is difficult, and the entire career runs on a cycle of pitching and rejection that would make anyone's confidence wobble.
For hair and makeup artists specifically, add in a job that is visually judged, publicly credited or not credited at all, and increasingly performed alongside an audience of Instagram accounts belonging to people with a fraction of your experience and several times the following. It's a genuinely difficult environment for anyone's sense of legitimacy, regardless of how many years you've put in.
Psychologist Valerie Young, who spent decades researching this after Clance and Imes's original work, found the feeling doesn't show up the same way for everyone. She grouped it into five patterns, and most people recognise themselves in at least one:
The Perfectionist can't accept a job well done unless it was flawless, and treats a single missed detail as proof of the whole fraud.
The Natural Genius feels like an impostor the moment something takes real effort or a few attempts, because they've quietly decided real talent should look effortless.
The Soloist treats asking another artist for help or advice as proof they shouldn't be doing this job at all.
The Expert believes they need to know every technique, product, and trend before they're allowed to call themselves qualified, so there's always another course to finish first.
The Superhuman feels they have to excel at the makeup, the business side, the marketing, and everything else all at once, or none of it counts.
I don't quite know which one I am yet.
Building something asks its own kind of question
Starting HMU Collective opened up conversations I'd never have had otherwise. People I'd never met messaged me, artist to artist, and a striking number of them, mostly women, told me they'd stepped away from freelance hair and makeup work altogether because the imposter feeling had become too overwhelming to keep working through.
Hearing that repeatedly did something I didn't expect. It made me confront my own version of it, and not just the version about whether I'm good enough with a brush. There's a separate, quieter one that shows up whenever I talk about HMU Collective itself. A voice that says it's audacious of me, someone who's only been properly inside this industry for four years, to build something meant to serve an entire industry of people who've often been doing this far longer than I have.
The way I've made peace with that particular flavour is by reminding myself that making change usually requires being a disruptor. Somebody far enough outside a broken system to actually see it clearly, rather than so far inside it that the cracks have started to look normal. That doesn't make the audacious feeling vanish. It just gives me something more useful to do with it than shrink.
I felt the exact same thing writing my ebook, More Than Good Makeup: A Leadership Field Guide for Hair and Makeup Teams. Who am I to write a leadership guide? I kept asking myself, for an industry I've only worked in for four years. The answer, when I actually sat with it, was straightforward. Years of leadership training and experience in a previous career didn't disappear when I retrained. It came with me. It's just been aimed somewhere new.
What the evidence actually says, helps!
Here's the honest bit, because I'm not going to pretend there's a magic fix. A large systematic review of the published research in 2020 found there isn't yet a solid evidence base for treatments aimed specifically at imposter feelings. What does have decent evidence behind it is self-compassion practice and the kind of thought reframing used in cognitive behavioural approaches, both of which help with the self-criticism and anxiety that tend to ride in the front seat with the imposter feeling, even if they don't erase it entirely.
There's also a growing body of research on social support specifically, separate from general self-help advice. Studies on students and professionals have found that peer support and mentorship measurably reduce the anxiety and stress that feed imposter feelings, and that external strategies like mentorship and structured peer networks tend to work better than anything a person tries to do alone in their own head. One study on medical students found that strong peer and family networks acted as a genuine buffer against imposter feelings even under high academic pressure.
That's the research reason behind something I already believed from experience. Freelancers weren't asking me for a community, because most of us didn't even clock what was missing until we felt the absence of it. I built HMU Collective because I'd lived the isolation myself and knew exactly what it does to your head when nobody around you is checking in. Not a ladder to climb, not a hierarchy handing down approval from people who've supposedly got it more sorted than you. Just a room full of people at every stage who've all had the same 3am spiral at least once, because the evidence says that room is genuinely one of the more useful things you can have.
Questions worth asking yourself mid-spiral
When it hits hard, on a job, in a classroom, wherever, these are the questions I've found more useful than trying to just talk myself out of it:
Is this feeling telling me something true about this specific situation, or is it just the old familiar noise?
Would I say this about a colleague with my exact level of experience?
What would I tell someone else standing exactly where I am right now?
Is any part of this discomfort actually about the room, not about me?
What's the evidence I've built up that this feeling is choosing to ignore?
None of these make the feeling disappear on command. They just give you somewhere else to put your attention besides the spiral.
If you want to read further
I went back to the source material for this one rather than the endless recycled listicles, and if you're curious I'd start in the same two places. The original 1978 paper by Clance and Imes is short, freely available, and genuinely interesting to read as the founding document of a phrase that's since gone everywhere. And the Tulshyan and Burey Harvard Business Review piece is worth reading in full for the counter argument alone, because it reframes the entire conversation from "how do I fix myself" to "what exactly am I being asked to adapt to, and should I."
If you want something more like a guidebook, Valerie Young's The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women is where her competence types come from in full, with exercises attached. Jessamy Hibberd's The Imposter Cure covers similar ground from a UK clinical psychologist's perspective and is a gentler entry point if you want something practical rather than academic. And if the "fix the room, not the person" argument resonated, Tulshyan's book Inclusion on Purpose takes that idea much further than one article ever could.
I still have my catalogue of classic films that none of those twenty-two-year-olds in that classroom had. It was never the wrong currency. It was just a different one, and the room needed both.
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