Beauty lies on the inside...apparently

Outer beauty is inner beauty made visible - Coelho

Sometime in your long or short, hopeless or worthy lives you must have come across a liar who told you,

“It doesn’t matter what you look like. Beauty lies on the inside.”

Well, I’ve got news for you bonny. It matters.

Your appearance is the first point of interaction between you and everything that isn’t you. Therefore, everything.

You see, it is quite hard to be truly and irrevocably ugly.

Just like it is terribly difficult to be objectively beautiful. You know what’s great though? Most of us aren’t competing for extremes; we can easily get by with an average hold over attractiveness. Knowing this, there is still much advocacy about the focus on exterior appeal being shallow. Why this futile attempt at rejecting an undeniable truth? From a young age, human saplings are told to focus on building their interiors with so much discrepancy to the exterior that the friction is hostile. I think all that instills in young minds is denial. It’s almost like inculcating the idea that focusing on the beauty of nature is vain. We should instead appreciate the resources it provides us with.

It’s ridiculous. We all know that isn’t how the world works. We love looking at the mountains, the sea, the trees as much as we love feeling the wind on our faces, eating fruits dripping with honey, and swimming freely in the ocean. The comparison seems kind of foolish, no? But being in denial has always been far easier than putting in effort. When you’re telling a shabby, ungroomed teenager that it is okay to put in zero effort to fix your face and still demand to be called beautiful as per today’s norms, you are teaching that kid to be an entitled bloke. They are going to grow up facing constant disappointments because the world wouldn’t give them more acknowledgment than they deserve. At this point, you’re thinking, what sort of a cunt post is this? Teaching people to shun self-love. A felon in these times. But we forget that self-care is an authentic form, if not the most important form of self-love. It requires effort though, right? So why not just reject this idea and instead pacify each other with bullshit like, “Looks don’t matter.”

It so does. You know it. I know it. Your grandmother knows it. Your dog knows it. Diddy grumbling in jail knows it.

Yes, it is necessary to develop a personality with impeccable character. There’s no way around that. But we cannot live life acting as if it isn’t that important to look nice. The redundancy of it kills me because this isn’t a condition where one needs to exist without the other!

We can all agree that it is alright to give equitable importance to both internal and external appeals.

Attraction is a fine form of human interaction. I have loved observing the details surrounding it. The mechanics, the loopholes, the adjustments. It’s fascinating. Of course, attraction and external appeal extend beyond the physicality we’re born with. But is it no doubt an important aspect. Attraction is essentially a collision. Collision of curiosity. It requires a spark to ignite, a scintillation if you will. This spark can be various forms of physical exudation. Why physical? In most scenarios, vision is the first sense of the six applied. Some would argue it’s smell, but smell is unquantified. Too abstract. It is inevitable to give some form of shape to an attractive smell. Unless of course, you’re being talked about in third person or read about in a book. Let me present you with an analogy. You’re at a café, and you want to catch someone’s eye. You need to gain their attention, right? There must be a collision, a spark. You can do that you visually align with their taste. Or you’re doing something interesting according to them- reading a book, writing, drawing, singing, dancing whatever. But the point is, to attract, you need to be interesting through imagery or action.

You cannot be plainly existing and except a line of potential sparks to go off in your name.

When I said that it is hard to be truly ugly, I wasn’t fumbling. Very few can do nothing about making themselves appear decent. It requires only a bit of vision and a slice of training to learn to make anything instantly pleasing to the eye. If experienced from a young age, it becomes a lifestyle. I have grown up watching my mother keep our house clean and presentable, adorned with flowers, little statues, and nice furniture. I copy that, out of habit perhaps. The efforts she put in didn’t look like it was taking a toll on her. She enjoyed the beauty of the walls enclosing her. Similarly, every day before going to work, she made sure she put on a cute outfit with her hair done well and her earrings matching her colors. It took her hardly fifteen minutes but taught me a lifelong lesson. Pouring care into yourself is as much your responsibility as it is other people's to treat you with kindness.

We tend to be confused over this one thing. Everyone deserves neutrality yes, but no one is entitled to mindless altruism. It's nice, but not guaranteed.

Yes, no one should get away with calling you ‘an ugly bitch’ unprovoked or provoked for that matter. But don’t expect anyone to call you Aishwarya Rai’s twin when you walk around with your face unwashed, nails dirty and hair in a fine tangle of goop and grime.

However, I have days when I want to walk around that way.

And I do.

I am sure, you do as well.

Sometimes, I simply do not give a shit. But my point is, I know what I am doing. I know I am being ugly. Existing unbothered and free. I accept and acknowledge that. I am not walking around with the illusion in my head that, “No matter how I look, I am beautiful because I have a heart gold. And everyone must see that.” I am not. I am stinking up the damn place and I know it. Does that mean I should be treated differently because I decided not to be presentable one day? In an ideal world, no. But realistically, you probably will. People form judgements on the basis of appearances as much as they do on the basis of reality. No matter how beautiful a building is on the inside or how much it has to offer, people would have reservations stepping in if the exterior is shady with peeling paint, surrounded by flies and dung. Don’t be dumb, accept reality and understand the difference between loving yourself and ruining yourself with lies formulated to make you feel like you’re loving yourself.