12 tips on beauty

“The best color in the whole world is the one that looks good on you.” — Coco Chanel

It is a commonplace now the knowledge that beautiful people have more advantages in life than “the others”. There are no ugly people, but still beauty can be, and will always be, put on a scale and we should not fuss too much about it.

The good news is that beauty is abstract. You may never know why you think someone is beautiful, nor why exactly someone thinks you are beautiful. This happens because the base ingredients of beauty are simple and common to all humans. The easy six. Yet there is also that which not only you know its beautiful, but you are sure everyone else will think so too. These are the less common traits. The hard six.

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion” — Edgar Allan Poe

The Easy Six:

1. good hair
2. good skin
3. bright eyes
4. good teeth
5. a personality
6. confidence

The Hard Six:

1. weight
2. fashion
3. look
4. behavior
5. soft fixes
6. hard fixes

The easy six

We are naturally evolved to like hair, skin, eyes and teeth. These are all a matter of personal hygiene and require the least of effort to obtain at good quality. Also this is where you can cheat a bit. Enrich your hair, whiten your teeth, “smoothen” your skin. This is not about makeup but simply care for these as much as possible in your current situation.

There is nothing beautiful in the world if it doesn’t stand out as something before being appreciated. If you constantly follow, have no opinions, no personal touch of your outer messaging then no one can appreciate your uniqueness. If one says about a rock that is beautiful, that rock has something about it: the color, the texture, the shine. There is no such thing as a plain flower, they are all distinct so the bees come to them. So must you become a unique flower and get a personality in the process.

Nothing beats confidence. This is borderline easy and hard. However it is not as hard as you think. Confidence in general is a helper for those around you. Here is the gist: we are scared and unsure every single day of our life. This is not a fault is a consequence of appearing out of the blue in this world. Therefore we constantly search for sure things to base our assumptions about reality on them. Confidence relieves us of the effort to make sure, it helps us stay at ease because we get outside feedback about the truth of a problem. In beauty terms, confidence halves our evaluation effort — that is why a self confident person will appear more beautiful than a fledgling unsure stunner.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered — Oscar Wilde

The hard six

Weight is hard to get right and hard to hold in place. The problem with weight is that skinny is not beautiful by default nor is fatty beautiful by default. To get it right is to give great consideration to proportion and symmetry and this really sucks when its about yourself. Above all is the constant social pressure on this item. Today is skinny, 300 years ago it was the other way around. Then its the control problem. You can control bad hair days but how fast or slow your metabolism is, not that easy.

Fashion is hard. It is a mobile target and very, very expensive. Also the taste you have in fashion might be bad for your appearance as beautiful. It means that using fashion to enhance beauty requires talent, and because talent is a natural given, not everyone has it. Fashion advice is one safe route to depression so this leaves huge fashion expenses as the way out for those untalented.

The look is how you present your image conceptualized. The look is the overall message that you send out from your appearance. You are for example a hippie, a hipster or a hepcat. You could be normcore, casual, metrosexual, antisystem etc. But this may or not help your outside perception as beautiful. For example say you are an Emo kid. That is a look but, if you have say a lengthy bone structure, the slender black accents of your look will make you appear dead and constantly dehydrated. Dead is not beautiful, if someone likes it: its a fetish.

Behavior that reflects in beauty perception is about: manners, elegance and posture. Manners make you more beautiful because people feel you are positive towards them. Elegance makes you pretty because it underlines your confidence and posture sends out signals like strength, openness and accessibility which all influence the perception of beauty.

Soft fixes are makeup, push-ups, extensions of any kind, highlights, stretching stuff you name it. These are hard for the same reasons fashion is hard. It requires acquired taste or talent. It can have a negative effect easily, a bad makeup is more negative then a bad outfit, and for quality you must shell out heavily.

Hard fixes are surgery most of the time. Now, these are the hardest because usually they hurt like hell and they require external, professional support to be achieved. If you ever judged anyone for having their nose shortened, breasts enlarged or fat sucked out, you are doing a bad thing because these people defeat their self conservation instinct — the same one that keeps one from jumping off a bridge — just to be beautiful in their eyes, while you expose to them how naturally superior you are for accepting yourself. Bad.

Yet, as a very important note, hard fixes are the extreme thing and like all extreme things that humans come in contact with, they do a lot of harm. Therefore if you are not in a situation of “killing millions to save billions” avoid them as much as you can, and be sure that you are not actually missing one of the easy six instead.