Beauty beyond the surface

We live in a world that is increasingly focused on appearance. For both men and women, external beauty has become something to achieve, maintain and display. We see it everywhere: in the images we scroll past, in the lengths people go to in order to look a certain way, in the quiet anxiety so many people carry about how they are perceived.

Fashion, cosmetic surgery, extreme exercise regimes, filters, lighting, angles- the pressure to look perfect, or at least to look like a perfected version of yourself, has never been louder.

I want to be clear: I do not think looking after yourself is wrong. Wanting to feel good in your body, taking care of how you present yourself, enjoying beauty, none of that is the problem. The problem is what we might be losing underneath all of it.

Because I think that in all this focus on the surface, we have started to stop there. Our eyes land on the outside of a person and our mind makes its judgement quickly, almost automatically. I noticed this recently when someone was telling me about a person they had just met. They started, as people almost always do, with appearance, especially when it comes to women: what she looked like, whether she was attractive. We are conditioned to lead with the surface and most of the time we do not even notice we are doing it.

Admiring a beautiful face or body is not so different from admiring a beautiful flower or a piece of art. There is nothing wrong with it, but a human being is so much more than something to be admired from a distance. We are not objects to be assessed. We are living, layered, complex things  and the most interesting parts of us are almost never visible at first glance,  they can only be felt over time, if we are willing to look with different eyes. Not the eyes that judge and categorise, but the ones that feel. The ones that notice the quality of someone's presence, the way they listen, the light in their eyes when they talk about something they love, the way they move through the world.

In my work as a tantric masseuse, I meet people of all shapes, different ages, sizes and backgrounds. People from their early twenties to their eighties. Slim, fuller-figured, athletic. tall, short, people with disabilities…every body is different, every person carrying their own history inside them. And what I have discovered, again and again, is that everybody is beautiful in their own particular way.

My eyes see more and my hands touch deeper than the surface. What I find there is always something worth seeing: a beautiful smile, an aliveness that someone carries in their body, the way a person seems at home in themselves, or is learning to be, the warmth that comes through in how they speak or how they listen. These things are deeply attractive and they have nothing to do with conventional standards of beauty.

Real beauty, I think, is not a static thing. It is not a look you can achieve and maintain. It lives in how someone is with people, in their kindness and their depth, in the way they make you feel when you are near them.

And beauty changes with time, as it should. We do not look the same at twenty-five as we do at eighty-five. The surface shifts, softens, marks itself with everything we have lived through. But inner beauty does not diminish with age, if anything, it deepens. Life adds layers to a person, layers of experience, of loss, of love, of wisdom and these are some of the most beautiful things about a human being.

I wonder what it would look like if we trained ourselves to look a little deeper. To speak less about appearances, to notice not just how someone looks, but how they feel to be around. To ask ourselves when we meet someone new, not whether we find them attractive, but whether they seem kind, real and there with us.

This is not an easy shift to make…We have been conditioned for a long time, but I think it is worth practising because the most beautiful people I have ever met are not the ones who looked the most perfect, they are the ones who made me feel most seen and alive around them.

Love,

Rosie x