On Beauty

we live in a society in which beauty plays a major part. a beautiful person will always have it so much easier than someone who is not. an ugly person might even end up as an outcast. being beautiful brings plenty of advantages in almost any area of society with it, while being not can bring quite a lot obstacles and problems.
i think it should be obvious that this *power* that is giving to the concept of beauty in society should be largely criticised.
but what is beauty exactly?
beauty is an ideal. in my opininion, any ideal generally is something that is dangerous and should be rejected, the same goes for beauty. but let us see what exactly this ideal of beauty is.

beauty is the idea to subjugate the human body to a certain set of philosophies, concepts, thought.
to hide the direct physicality of the body and instead turn it into a representation of abstract ideas.

the human body is part of nature. it is feral. the mind has no direct control of the body, not in the way we have control about our acts and other things.
your hair grows wild and your facial features are like nature want them to be, not like you intend them to be.
and the body is physical.

and this is why people hate the body. instead they want to submit it to ideas, as mentioned above.
this is why there is so much focus on symmetry when it comes to the beauty of body and face, and the quest for similiar - maybe one could call it "geometric" - qualities (a study i seen once concluded that most people find those faces of men and women the most beautiful that look somewhat *geometrically* pure).
because these are abstract concepts and the body has to submit to them.
similiar, the ideas the body is subjected to are those that are generally held high in the specific society.
in our society, blond hair is - at least to an extend - attributed with purity, a certain type of boldness, being correct, etc. (at least in fiction - in older fiction also things such as bravery are attributed).
since these are also the ideals of our society, blond hair is thus seen as beautiful.

let me further explain this concept. if you would just let your body be like it is and never do anything to control it, let your hair grow, as a woman not use make up (and keep your physical face as it is), and so on, then you'd probably be considered to be ugly by others. if you did nothing to interfere and change it, your looks wouldn't get much approval by others.

or think about piercings, tattoos. some tattoos almost look like scars. yet they are seen beautiful by a lot of people(even if maybe not by the majority - also don't get me wrong, i love tattoos too), while an actual scar would not, even if it looked the same way.
if you'd delibaretedly get a tattoo in the design of a scar, still people would not be as repulsed as by a real scar, and this could actually become a fashion (or maybe already was) in some circles.
because this is then something intentional, that comes from the mind, while the latter would be something comes from your body.

there is so much hostility against the body in the concept of beauty.

now in our society it's necessary to keep a certain standard of beauty in order to not run into many problems (athough an all-out natural body revolution sounds like a nice concept too that maybe could be put into practice). yet be aware that the ideal of beauty is useless and without meaning, and try to be free of it at least for yourself.

it is the actual, physical body - as imperfect and ugly it might be - that is amazing.