Beauty Isn't Superficial

The catch: What the industry sells us isn't beauty.

@topicals

Beauty isn’t superficial.

Beauty — like freedom, like truth, like love! — is an innate human longing. We crave it. We need it in our lives. We’re filled with the urge to express it.

The problem is, the kind of “beauty” that beauty culture promotes is a flattened, hollow, purely aesthetic approximation of the beauty the human spirit craves — which is why none of the industry’s products and procedures ever really satisfy us.

The gap between the beauty we crave and the beauty we’re sold is “the void” people talk about filling. That gap is why we keep buying more, why we can’t resist the next new product launch, why we look in the mirror and search for flaws — whether flaws to fix or flaws to learn to love. The void can’t be filled by industrialized beauty, because industrialized beauty is not actually beauty. 

Think of it like art: When you see a beautiful painting, you don’t just admire its canvas, right? The beauty isn’t in the rectangular shape or sharp edges of its form. The painting is beautiful because of its essence: The way it makes you feel, what it has to say, some unknown something about it — and yes, in part, its aesthetic. Beauty is the culmination of all of these things. And that can’t be standardized.

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This excerpt previously appeared as part of the Topicals Mental Health Day initiative.