An Apology For The Ugly

I came across a recent personal blog posting from full-time slacker proclaiming a deep admiration for a certain Mr. Yakult based solely on his looks. A quick disgust swept over my eyes, and I would proclaim without even looking at Yakult’s photo that he is not that remarkable. That statement was not born of envy because I have never been a declared idol of teenage girls before, so I can speak with no authority with regards to preference of his life to mine. I am, however, in authority to speak for the ugly.

Let us normalize beauty for a moment, whatever culture we reside in let us assume we are discussing the same features that make someone desirable. I would like to propose a de facto standard of beauty, a global beauty, to be that which is propagandized to us through movies and magazines.

I hate to look at myself in the mirror because I know that person behind the mirror will never make the cover of a magazine. I know that girls are in no danger of fainting by my presence. Society has made us all ghouls. We grasp at every tool available to hide that visage in the mirror and attempt to transform ourselves into something beautiful. We go to the extent of jeopardizing our health, to look good; doing unnecessary operations.

We are like a serpent eating its tail, the more we try to look good, the harder it gets. Because being beautiful is being exceptional, if a certain level of beauty is attainable, a sense of normalcy seeps in. Beauty is therefore by definition exclusive and the barrier of entry has been money. Unfortunately, we have localized economy distributions, small clusters of effluence in developed countries where that monetary exclusivity is lost. At these epicenters of beauty, a warped development occurs.

Beauty by danger. Weight loss drugs, dangerous diets, surgical procedures, new fangled methods of achieving levels of beauty once thought impossible by human beings. Like a bonsai twisted beyond its form, beauty is rare.