Enough: Are you Beautiful Enough?
“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest in the land?” “My Queen, you are the fairest here, so true. But Snow White is a thousand times more beautiful than you.”
We already know about the tragic ending of the Queen. As a child, I thought that the Queen was a perpetrator, attempting to murder Snow White, and Snow White was a poor victim. So, the evil Queen must be punished for stealing beauty, and Snow White definitely deserved to marry a handsome prince because she has a very kind and beautiful mind equal to her beautiful face. But the more I am getting older, the more I wonder if the Queen was really a perpetrator. What makes her the darkest in the land? What makes a prince fall in love with Snow White at very first sight? Is it her beautiful mind or her beautiful appearance?
I grew up reading and watching many fairy tales — Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and the Little Mermaid, just to name a few. There are always two polarized sides of women which are the bright, good, kind and even beautiful like an angel and the dark, bad, unkind, and even ugly like a demon. Most fairy tales told me the importance of outer beauty rather than the importance of inner beauty. It also tried to persuade me to believe its logical reasons, which is that if a woman has a beautiful appearance, her mind is also beautiful. She meets a handsome prince and marries him. They live happily ever after. So, the good life is to be a prince’s bride; and to meet a prince, I have to be beautiful enough, and to be beautiful enough, I have to make myself look like a girl who is in fairy tales: an oval face with long hair, white skin without blemish, big eyes like a deep blue lake, red lips like a cherry, and a thin and slender body that causes a protective instinct… I saw a mirror, but there was no such a girl in the mirror. What I saw was a tomboy wearing glasses with thick lenses. So, I realized there was such a prince in my life at an early age, and it was a wild-goose chase to wander and wait for that prince. Instead, I decided to go my own way to see the world from a different perspective.
The world has changed very fast, hour by hour and minute by minute, but why hasn’t the ideal beauty standard changed? Why has the obsession of the beauty in humans’ vision highly exacerbated the situation? That’s the unsolved question. The more the technology has developed, the more various easy ways to make us artificially beautiful has tempted us. These days beauty is not just born but can be reconstructed or rebuilt.
“The way I perceive beauty has changed, because when I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful, but sound terrible.”
Neil Harbisson is total color blind, but he can perceive colors in a different way. He can hear colors with a special device and feel the colors not by how they look but how they sound.
Let’s imagine in the world that all people are blind or have a different vision like insects or other animals. Or if we have a different perspective system to detect things and people like Neil Harbisson, would we have still the same standard of beauty to validate people on the spectrum from beautiful and ugly or good and bad, or could we have different senses to recognize the true beauty?
People say, “Beauty is eye of the beholder.”, but unfortunately most beholders wear the same glasses to see only the same standard of beauty. We usually say, “Beauty is only skin deep.”, but sadly, 80–85% of our perception is dominated by our superficial vision to judge beauty by only skin deep. “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”I like this quote, but it sounds very pessimistic from a different point of view. I think everyone can see it, but not everyone does, so the obsession of beauty became an incurable disease that even highly developed modern medical science cannot cure. I also want to believe that “Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”, but the reality is that the beauty is not only in the face but also in the body, and beauty failure is regarded as the whole failure of ourselves because we don’t have true eyes that can see a light in the heart.
Look beautiful or feel beautiful?
Look at this picture. What are you feeling about it? Is it beautiful?
Now, I will tell a behind story about this painting. This is the last picture that my friend drew right before she lost her eyesight. She had a problem with her retinas, and it made her gradually blind.
Look at the picture again. Do you feel it is beautiful now?
Well, to tell the truth, the story was made up. If you felt it was beautiful after listing to the story, I’m really sorry about that. I saw this picture at a restaurant. As soon as I entered the place, it caught my eye, and I felt it was really beautiful, so I couldn’t not help taking a picture of it. It is a true story.
Look at the picture again. How do you feel? Do you still feel it is beautiful?
Something beautiful doesn’t mean something just good-looking. It is feeling from the heart, not from your vision. It is emotional, not rational. It is individual, not collective. It is subjective, not objective. It can be pleasant. It can be poignant. It can be bright. It can be dark. When you listen to music, watch movies, or see paintings, nobody forces you to feel only one emotion. Feeling beautiful is different, various, and diverse. So, it is very difficult to describe why it is beautiful. It is the same as feeling like it is hard to tell why I love you or to show how much I love you.
However, when it comes to beauty of human beings, there is always ideal beauty standard that is implicitly consented in society. It is a collective idea that makes people unconditionally and blindly follow. We just see and judge a person as how they look, not as how you feel. We have been having invisible and intense competition for who looks more beautiful and better-looking. The world has been suffering from this pandemic disease. Someday in the future, we will have different “before”, but same “after”. The world will be filled with artificial beauty. There is no such thing like feeling beautiful. We will have a life manual for when we have to get plastic surgery the same as nowadays when we have to go to school, get a job, get married, and have children. It will be recorded as a new theory of evolution of human species by artificial selection.
Just let yourself go
It doesn’t mean laziness and indifference. It means making your own style and finding yourself who you are, as you are.
It doesn’t matter how people view you and judge you. It matters how much you know about yourself and how well you understand about yourself from your own perspective.
Do not chase your fake image anymore. You don’t need to look like anyone. Do not waste of your life to find what you lack or how you are incomplete.
Stop saying you are beautiful enough becasue you are you. “Beautiful” is just one of adjectives in the dictionary. It can never be an absolute and relative standard to articulate who you really are.
Close your eyes. Look inside of yourself and listen to your inner voice.
What do you see, what do you hear, and what do you feel?
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart. (Helen Keller)
