1 hour ago
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Hey Ugly,
They say we end up with the face we deserve. When we think “ugly” (hurtful, spiteful, non-constructive) thoughts, our faces tense and harden. Similarly, when I ignore my needs, my face shows me signs of it.
While you have valid critiques of beauty culture, I’d like to see them balanced with inspiring solutions, like expanding upon this “inner beauty” – beauty in energetic and emotional form, the eternal youthfulness that no filler or lift can imitate and no wrinkle can hide. I genuinely believe this would contribute towards a greater good!
– Begin Within
Two things can’t both be true here. Either the soul shapes the body (“you get the face you deserve”) or it doesn’t (“no wrinkle can hide inner beauty”).
Join me in a little thought experiment: how can we visually determine when wrinkles indicate the ordinary ageing of a good-natured person, then? How do they physically differ from those of a “spiteful” person?
We can’t, and they don’t, because this isn’t how bodies and souls work.
And yet, these beliefs are as widely held as they are wrong!
Consider the public reaction to Vanity Fair’s recent up-close and, uh, pore-sonal portraits of members of the Trump administration. Comedian Lisandra Vázquez zeroed in on 28-year-old press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s fine lines, saying: “If you’re evil, you will age like milk” (99,000 likes, 65,000 shares).
Images of 68-year-old chief of staff Susie Wiles provoked similar comments: “Lying is bad for your skin,” “Hate ages people horribly” and cracks about her “thin, villainous lips”.
Now consider the public reaction to a pivotal scene in 2023’s Barbie, in which a wrinkled, 91-year-old woman smiles at Barbie, who in return tells her she’s “beautiful”. Greta Gerwig, the director, called this “the heart of the movie”. Fans agreed. “You look at women who have lived life and think, wow, what beauty,” one Reddit commenter wrote after watching.
So what’s happening here?
Our perception of a person’s physical beauty is colored by our perception of their behavior. If you look at Wiles’s wrinkles and see evil, it’s not because wrinkles signal moral failing; it’s because you think Wiles’s actions do. If an old lady smiles at you warmly and you see beauty, it’s not because wrinkles signal virtue; it’s because her warmth does. Our silly little brains collapse these ethical judgments into aesthetic ones because human beings are physical, visual creatures, desperate to make visible sense of abstract thoughts.
The false association between inner goodness and outer beauty is hard to shake for a few reasons. For starters, it’s old: the ancient Greeks used the same word, kalos, for both. In the 18th century, the concept found new life in phrenology and physiognomy – fields of pseudoscience that claimed people’s facial characteristics were manifestations of their character – which were weaponized by racists, eugenicists and Nazis to exert power over people they deemed “lesser than”.
This framework has since been discredited, but it’s still constantly reinforced in western culture – read Perfect Me: Beauty As an Ethical Ideal by Heather Widdows for more on this.
It’s also a profitable idea for cosmetic companies, which promise “inner beauty” through external and highly visible consumption, as Tressie McMillan Cottom writes in Thick & Other Essays.
(In my former life as a beauty editor, I was guilty of this myself. Sorry!)
If you want an “inspiring solution”, how about completely divorcing inner and outer beauty?
I think this starts with language – molder of minds, shaper of beliefs.
Much like in ancient Greece, “beauty” serves as a catch-all term for many separate ideas today: the formal beauty of nature or art, a person’s physical appearance and the “energetic, emotional” state you reference (among others).
At least some of the above ethics/aesthetics confusion stems from using the same word to describe, say, donating a kidney to a stranger and getting a BBL with cadaver fat, right? These are different things! They demand different names!
If I had my say, we’d reserve “beauty” for flowers, paintings, sculptures, songs. A ripe peach, or a well-composed photograph. Satisfying sentences. My mother’s loopy handwriting. Sensorial experiences that take us beyond ourselves, and beyond our own bodies.
When self-interest is involved, philosophers argue the word “beauty” doesn’t apply, anyway. Immanuel Kant said experiences of beauty must be “disinterested” – in other words, appreciated for their own sake, with no benefit to the beholder. Iris Murdoch described beauty as “an occasion for unselfing”.
What the beauty industry sells us isn’t beauty at all then, but “appearance” or “cosmetics” or sometimes “hygiene”.
And if a person’s appearance or spirit draws you in and incites desire? That’s attractiveness.
You say your face shows when you’ve neglected your needs. This falls under the banner of health. Physical and mental wellbeing can influence what you look like, sure – dehydration dulls skin; stress furrows brows and forms wrinkles – but this has nothing to do with getting what you “deserve”. Good people experience line-forming stress! Bad people meditate daily! Plenty of lovely people lack healthcare, and plenty of terrible people pay top dollar for it!
And while everyone deserves access to it, no one has a moral obligation to be or look healthy.
As for the “inner beauty” you describe – the sort that “contributes to the greater good”? I’d simply call it goodness. Focus on that. It won’t change your face, but look on the bright side: that means “no wrinkle can hide it”, either.
