live life fully

by: Georgette Jupe

The media has always had opinions about women’s bodies.

Too fat. Too thin. Too old. Too much.

Those of us who came of age in the early 2000s know this in our bones. We were shaped by the same magazines that chased celebrities’ worst angles and ran diet tips next to salacious headlines about teenage bodies.

We absorbed it while watching our mothers fret over every extra slice of bread.

Danae Mercer Ricci spent years on the inside of that machine, editing the magazines and learning the angles. 

Understanding exactly how a body could be made to look different before the photo even loaded. She knew how to shoot at sunrise to hide cellulite. She knew which lighting made a stomach disappear.

Then COVID hit and allowed her the space to put down the editorial playbook which is when everything changed.

This is the thing about Danae: the version you know from Instagram, the body confidence posts, the going-viral moments on Good Morning America, and the woman sitting across from me over coffee in Florence are not different people. They are the same person, with complicated feelings about all of it.

THE CAREER

Before Florence, there was Dubai. Before Dubai, a decade of health and travel journalism built on moving fast and going everywhere. Danae was editor-in-chief of Women’s Health Middle East and Men’s Health Middle East. She was based in the Gulf and traveled the world, very much her own person going her own way.

It was also, she says, where she learned every trick in the editorial book. The sunrise shoot. The strategic angle. The lighting that erases. She understood the machine from the inside, which is precisely why, when she eventually chose to dismantle it, she knew exactly what she was doing.

“I felt like women didn’t understand that so much of what we see online is so curated, beyond just Photoshop.”

“A million followers can make you feel completely alone. The space between your public self and your private one can be exactly where confidence goes to dissolve.”

THE VIRAL MOMENT

When Dubai locked down in 2020, Danae had around 60,000 followers and, for the first time in years, no editorial brief. Six weeks confined to her apartment, so she started making things for herself.

What mattered to her in that moment were bodies and the mental health of those around her. The gap between what Instagram looked like and what real life looked like, right then, in that light. She knew the tricks and she’d spent years applying them. 

People were like… “wait, is this real?”

One post showed her posing next to an unposed version of herself, featuring the cellulite, no flattering angle, and no filter. It went everywhere. Think Good Morning America and news stations across the world.

She subsequently hit a million followers and her friends surprised her with balloons. But inside, she cried herself to sleep every night.

It wasn’t hate she was reacting to, this was the loss of something smaller: the 60,000 people she’d known, in the way you feel comfortable within a community that had transformed into more than a million strangers in the space of a few weeks.

The intimacy she’d built her confidence on was simply gone. “I thought everyone hated me. It was really, really detrimental to my mental health. And I say that as someone who was around 35 at the time, had been editor-in-chief of multiple publications.”

FROM DUBAI TO FLORENCE

It was also around this time that she met Nicco, an affable Florentine, relaxed in nature and the kind of person who genuinely means it when he says let’s enjoy the weekend. They did long distance before she moved to Florence in the spring of 2021. They married along the Amalfi Coast and now they have two children; a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and a dachshund named Romeo who has, after some early tension, become best friends with one of her rescue cats.

The thing is Florence was not Dubai, and that took longer to accept than she expected.

“Florence is a city that is all about protecting history, culture and heritage. It’s proudly Italian and slower and comfortable with a completely different rhythm. So beautiful, but so different from where I was.”

In Dubai, things moved fast.

Packages came to your door, new ideas never seemed impossible. In Florence, she spent hours in post office lines, braving paperwork that seemed designed to break your spirit (we’ve all been there) and being creative did not equal a way to facilitate new projects in a logical fashion. Plus, the language barrier. 

“If you try to fight it, you feel like you’re walking through bubble gum and every day is a battle. So eventually you have to surrender.”

So Piano piano. Little by little. She has come to understand that the very impossibility of certain things here is what keeps so much of it intact: the small family-run businesses, the fourth espresso taken at the bar while standing, the absolute refusal to rush what shouldn’t be rushed. Italy does not adapt to you. You adapt to Italy. And if you can make peace with that, something will start to shift.

The second time the online world would hurt her badly came after she had moved to Florence. Two days postpartum, struggling to breastfeed, she opened a Google Alert and found a forum with several women writing: “you can see the baby doesn’t love her. You can see she’s an awful mom.” Like your worst fear come to life, everyone judging you and your family.

“When you’re postpartum, you’re already feeling like you’re failing… and then reading that is such an incredible blow to your self-esteem.”

She is open about it and has moved on. But she has clearly never stopped thinking about what it really costs women to be visible, and what it costs when no one is watching at all.

THE REAL CONFIDENCE PROJECT

The work she is doing now in schools grew from all of this — and from watching her daughter begin to grow up in a world engineered to make her feel like not enough.

She started going into schools. Sitting across from girls aged ten and eleven and asking: what’s the meanest thing someone has said to you online?

She expected body comments but what she found went much further.

“It wasn’t only about the body. The comments were more about worth. ‘You’re not smart enough.’ ‘No one will ever love you.’ ‘You don’t deserve to be here.'”

And then, again and again, across every age group: kill yourself.

“These are ten, eleven, twelve-year-old girls telling each other to kill themselves. And then I go into university settings, and it doesn’t stop.”

The Real Confidence Project is her attempt to go inside that noise and give girls something to hold onto. Students from ten years old through university. She talks AI-generated influencers, about what’s real and what isn’t. Where you find your own voice when the platform is designed to drown it out.

She connects her own history to the work without making it about her. Sharing about her eating disorder at Cambridge and the experience of going viral. The forum she found two days postpartum in Florence.

WHAT ITALY HAS TAUGHT HER ABOUT HERSELF

She is still working out what she looks like in this life. Two kids, a body that has changed, a city that is complicated for the best of us.

One story that made me smile was when her mother-in-law once accompanied her to the Questura, that famously grim bureaucratic rite of passage for anyone formalizing their life here (I have my own stories). She came wearing a Hermes bag and Chanel shoes, completely composed, as if the whole business of immigration were a minor inconvenience at worst. It is funny and for sure emulates the concept that dressing well isn’t always just for a special occasion but even just for yourself if that’s what makes you happy.

She sees it in older Italian women more broadly. The ones who dye their hair purple and wear it as if it is the most natural choice in the world (as they should). Clothing and personal style is often a genuine pleasure.

“Being in Italy has taught me that fashion can be your armour, your confidence booster. It’s fun , but it’s important to do it for yourself.”

Her definition of success right now is balance. She has always been extreme, obsessive about work — she connects this directly to the eating disorder, to a going-to-extremes pattern she has spent years trying to understand. Nicco is the opposite. He is happiness personified and tends to go with the flow. The lighthouse needs to stay grounded. “He’s always saying: Danae, dai, stop working, let’s enjoy the meal, let’s enjoy the weekend.”

She laughs.

In it you can hear both the gratitude and the work behind it: the ongoing project of becoming someone who can actually sit still long enough to be in the weekend she’s in.

“SHOULD” IS NOT A LIFE PLAN

I asked her, at the end, what she would say to someone struggling with how they see themselves.

“Be gentle with wherever you are today. We, especially as women, feel so tied to ‘should.’ I should be a better mom. I should be more successful. I should go to the gym. Should, should, should, and it loops into shame.”

A pause.

“Let’s just push that aside and say: okay, this is where I am today. And that’s okay too.”

It is what she tells the girls in her workshops and it remains something she has had to learn herself, more than once, in more than one country, under more than one version of her own life.

Danae is five years into life in Florence, with two babies, a new body, a project that matters, and enough admin tasks that it, at times, feels debilitating. She is not there yet, she’d be the first to say so. But she is learning, slowly, to let that be enough.

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