Why not be ashamed to pay much attention to looks?
Masha Vorslav
Oddly enough, the biggest ethical question is, which bothered me all three years of work as a beauty editor, is it a shame to pay attention to the appearance and give it a lot of attention. It is difficult for me to understand it not only because of the combination of the Wonderzine body-positive course and the essence of the work of the Beauty section editor and make-up artist, but also because I have always been attracted to beautiful things and people - and this, by all accounts, is an indicator of empty-headedness and superficiality.
Recently, they wrote to me from a well-known Russian edition and offered to speak as an expert in their material on beauty. It was necessary to choose some of the most beautiful, in my opinion, people and describe why I consider them beautiful. After analyzing similar comments by several experts, the editors were going to understand the modern attitude to appearance and to derive a portrait of a beautiful person.
I refused to participate in the material, although always, when I hear talk of beauty, I make a hunting counter. I tried to explain why I did not see the opportunity to take part in this material: yes, they say, I have personal aesthetic preferences, but they cannot serve as a basis for any expertise. Despite the fact that I have been busy with beauty for several years, I cannot categorize people and be an expert in appearance. Such, in my opinion, can be considered, for example, a sociologist who would analyze the opinion of a part of the population and deduced regularities from their preferences. My opinion, despite the fact that I am a make-up artist and I seem to know a little more about the beauty of the average person, is equivalent to the opinion of any other person, and what facial features I consider attractive should not form anyone's ideas, and no one needs to know about it. We didn’t work with that edition, but I am glad that I was asked this question.
Before, I was always ashamed of the fact that beautiful things give me a lot of pleasure (appearance is not the main thing!). I carefully choose the environment: I select the wardrobe and furniture in the room so that I was beautiful in it. I can wear an ugly thing, in my opinion, or spend time in a room with hated orange walls - tragedy will not happen, but I will be sad and uncomfortable.
With the help of empathy, the alien object becomes native and beautiful.
Somewhere about a year ago, I first heard the opinion that you should not be shy about your craving for beauty, but you need to treat it as a filter: they say, things and people who like inherently will be loved by appearance, and vice versa. This thought did not exactly justify me in my own eyes, but offered a completely logical explanation for what was happening around. Indeed, my best friends seem to me very beautiful, and with people who are attractive to me, there is usually something to talk about.
It is important to note that the concept of beauty is not static, it is constantly transformed and enriched. A simple example: at the show Jason Wu FW16-17, Ruth Bell was released with eyelashes stuck together in four spider legs. Seeing her photo for the first time, I wrote in my channel about cosmetics that I need to think about this makeup and then I can decide whether I like it or not. I will briefly retell the reasoning of that time: when I see an object that is incomprehensible and ugly at first glance, I try to figure out what its creator meant, or load it with my own meanings and memories.
So, with the help of empathy, the alien object becomes native and, the interdimensional transition that is the most surprising for me, is beautiful. In other words, if the head is able to accommodate an explanation for the existence of a phenomenon and does not reject it, it automatically becomes beautiful and adds to your own concept of beauty. Therefore, people consider different things to be beautiful and there cannot be a single standard of beauty - just as there can not be two heads filled with the same information and identical life experience.
If you go from the back side, even a person who does not really like himself can become beautiful for himself if he becomes more aware of himself and changes his appearance and the surrounding space in accordance with his beliefs and knowledge. In a more practical sense, this means that you can make yourself more attractive by your standards (and when a person considers himself beautiful, he automatically convinces others), and the selection of the necessary “wrapper” is a skill that can be developed.
With joyful surprise, I found that such an explanation allows me to stop being ashamed of my pronounced craving for visuality. Beauty in accordance with it is precisely the indissoluble combination of the external and the internal, where one cannot exist without the other. Remember the ordinary semantic figure: like a beautiful man, but how to open his mouth, it is impossible to look at him. Its external beauty is leveled by internal anti-beauty (which is also subjective for everyone, of course) and becomes much less pronounced or disappears altogether. The most interesting and inspiring with such an installation is that it encourages you to learn more about the world around you, because then it flourishes and becomes more beautiful - and you can’t think of more motivation for those who care about beauty.