On the terror of beauty, questioning the system and climate catastrophes
Reflections on my personal experience with beauty, aesthetics as social currency, celebrities brands and terrifying climate disasters.
Lately, I’ve been considering what it means to feel ugly. Not in a self-aggrandizing way to invite others to commiserate or in a matter-of-fact way — just simply feeling the weight of existence. I think I can’t be the only one who looks out at our world, reads the news and wonders about our collective insanity? Holding so many dualities at once is at the core of being human. How one human body can simultaneously experience happiness, peace, jubilee, frustration, deep anger, sorrow and resentment. That’s incredible and even more so equally terrifying.
I recently started the journey of locking my hair (see the excellent piece about the history of locs by Kyle Ring for Esquire for information on Black hair), and I’m going through what’s burdensomely referred to in the loc community as “the ugly stage”. I’ve watched countless videos learning and gaining knowledge from my fellow loc sistas (shoutout to Youtube creators!) about the locking process, best practices and embracing the journey. It all lands well but doesn’t sit well. It’s hard to navigate change when you don’t know how you’ll come out of it — I think that’s an allegory for human life. In our DNA, is it encoded to be mobile, adapt and shapeshift, but is it this exact condition that brings about vast suffering. Needless to say, I’m working through it. The idea of beauty and feeling pretty is an interesting dinner table topic I’ve pondered over because we are all forced to reckon with the terror of beauty (especially those of us that are femmes, disabled, fat, trans, dark skin and the like). It’s inescapable and embedded into our society to seek beauty and create it through the use of marketing products, tools and regimens that promise happiness as reward.
It has such a bone-crushing effect on everyone, look at how GQ magazine recently wrote a piece about men below a certain height opting for radical surgeries to have their actual legs broken to grow anywhere between 3 to 6 inches taller. It’s almost unbelievable, bizarre and out of place but then the lengths (pun intended) we extend for beauty and aesthetics fall exactly within those confines. The piece refers to a 2009 Australian study that found that on average, short men make less income than their taller peers, a gaping measurement that amounts to about 500$ a year per inch. Shorter men were also less likely to occupy senior roles with the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO landing at 6 feet tall. Isn’t that fascinating? Or does it beget more introspection as to how things ended up this way?
We are all forced to reckon with the terror of beauty. It’s inescapable and embedded into our society.
Some pointers to look for can be found in modern dating discourse online, where the term short kings has emerged (a.k.a men who are under 6 feet). Everyone faces their encounters with beauty culture differently. In recent years, there has been more open acceptance for body surgeries and modifications with many arguing that we can change what we see fit without justification. The rebuttal — the skin we live in is malleable and it’s a personal choice to bend it towards our will.
Beauty is power, beauty is influence, some might say beauty reigns supreme, though not all that glitters is gold. As beauty writer Jessica Defino (her Substack newsletter ‘The Unpublishable’ is worth the read) wrote for VICE, the demands of beauty culture are not neutral. “The normalization of cosmetic surgery, illusory makeup, and altered photos raise the baseline standard of beauty for all — a form of aesthetic inflation, if you will. It makes it harder for women and girls to opt out of spending their time, money, and energy on aesthetic labor without facing financial and social consequences.” Given the facts and beauty faux pas (if you will) there are many challenges to engaging with beauty culture authentically, but it can’t keep its chokehold on us if we continue to question the system.
Every day, without hitting the breaks, celebrities, public personalities and influencers are releasing beauty and skincare lines. Take Brad Pitt, the latest unsuspecting public figure to release 400$ skin serums. It’s too much. Though the 2017 release of Fenty Beauty by Rihanna proved the rare exception to the rule and led an entire industry to make darker foundation shades mainstream — brands reflect our social culture and evolve as we do. Yet, I’d be reluctant to say we’ve evolved considerably as famous people continue to peddle brands without thought and the wheels of capitalism keep turning. Despite the viral memes, tweets and posts that inevitably emerge after a celebrity releases a B2C beauty product line, something that never seems to catch mainstream attention is the environmental impact.
Taking into account, the entire celebrity-to-beauty-product pipeline, which considers the rise of celeb branding with the rise of social media for the past 10 years — I wonder where this stuff goes after we’ve consumed, emptied plastic bottles and trends change. Who is responsible for the waste, consumption and fast fashion-like consumer cycle of beauty? Look no further than the current carnage happening to our only livable planet (a.k.a. Earth) where hurricanes and climate catastrophes this past month alone have wreaked havoc across the globe.
Despite the viral memes, tweets and posts that inevitably emerge after a celebrity releases a B2C beauty product line, something that never seems to catch mainstream attention is the environmental impact.
I’ve thought about how 1/3 of Pakistan is underwater before I go to bed, attempting to amplify donation fundraisers like the Humanitarian Coalition desperately raising 10,000$ for disaster aid with funds being matched by the Canadian government. Or how Puerto Rico, which never recovered from the 2017 category 5 Hurricane Maria continues to be systemically neglected by the US government in the wake of Hurricane Fiona raining in September 2022 which has left the nation without power. In the same breath, without light in my own country of birth, Eastern Canada saw the aftermath of hurricane winds land in Nova Scotia, knocking down power lines and physically tearing houses apart.
Is Mother Nature pulling a ‘Great Resignation’ in the most humanly way possible leaving us to scramble and pull our act together? The situation continues to evolve at alarming rates we’ve been cognizant of for decades and yet when it is right in front of us only now are we inclined to panic.
Is Mother Nature pulling a ‘Great Resignation’ in the most humanly way possible leaving us to scramble and pull our act together?
Considering the rate of destruction of things, I don’t think my feelings of ugliness are sorely mine to bare. Beauty can be terrorizing and so is the state of our fragile Earth ecosystem, we are so determined to contour our supply chain demands. Despite it all, subscribing to doomsday narratives won’t save us and will not change the need for accountability and radical change. I won’t look away and I invite others as well to see through the fog. It’s a tough and complex journey for what lies ahead for humanity, but the path will be carved by the beauty of our creativity to reimagine and redefine a better world.
