Aesop on True Beauty vs Mimetic Beauty
The Psychological Explanation of why women work so hard to look so bad
Why do women still get lip fillers even though ever man ever consistently tells them that they look terrible? Why do they still wear pounds and pounds of makeup even though it is repeatedly expressed by men that it doesn’t make her look more beautiful? Ordinary women, in their lack of self-awareness (if not outright dishonesty) claim that this is because they are “doing it for themselves”. They are incorrect. They are not doing it for themselves. They are doing it for other women and their perceptions of what will gain them social capital. And this is has wreaked aesthetic havoc on society.
There is a fable that I read today from Aesop called “The Horse and the Groom”. It goes like this:
A dishonest groom used to steal and sell a horse’s oats and grain on a regular basis. He would, however, spend hours busily grooming and rubbing him down to make him appear in good condition. Naturally, the horse resented this treatment and said, “If you really want me to look well, groom me less and feed me more.”
The average girl today is inundated with endless marketing and messaging about various beauty rituals that they must do to become more beautiful. Some examples include red light therapy, retinol, vitamin C, fillers, “preventative” botox, rhinoplasty, veneers, hair extensions, twelve step Korean skincare “routines”, elaborate facials, gua sha etc. If none of these words mean anything to you, then you are a man or you are blessed to have been sheltered sufficiently from this cultural phenomenon. Various “attractive” influencers appear on tiktok and instagram to tell young girls about what they need to do to achieve the same look.
This look has come to be called “instagram face”. It makes the women who get it all appear as the same version of Kylie Jenner. They efface any feature of themselves that might have produced a glimmer of true fantastic beauty.
"There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion." Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia
The sentiment is repeated in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace:
“As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.”
Perhaps this is why Sydney Sweeney has attracted so much interest of late. She is one actress who has refused to succumb to “instagram face” and her appearance, although nothing to the great beauties like Cindy Crawford and Catherine Zeta Jones, at the very least looks human and individual and in this way, beautiful.
Beauty has been democratized as a potion in a bottle, a procedure, that if you follow exactly, you too can replicate and enjoy the rewards that a pretty face wins in the world. It doesn’t take much thought to consider why industries would be motivated to promote this worldview. The procedures they sell don’t merely stop at expensive cosmetics and plastic surgery, they extend to various types of workouts and supplements as well. What I describe isn’t a new phenomenon in kind because beauty has always been a lucrative industry, but it is novel in its scale and penetration due to the social media influencer model. And the scale increases its harms.
It would take hours to describe all the details of what makes many of these cosmetic procedures harmful to people who undergo them thoughtlessly. Rhinoplasties that leave people unable to breathe through their noses because they were not done properly. Fillers and implants that linger in the body and cause autoimmune diseases to wreak havoc on the body. Cosmetics that irritate the sensitive layers of skin and cause them to age prematurely due to this irritation. In fact, the rate of young women in their twenties getting face lifts has dramatically increased in the last 5 years alone due to the fact that when they decide to get their fillers dissolved (as duck lips seem to be no longer trending) the skin has stretched so much that it sags when unfilled with chemical concoctions. Veneers that leave people with teeth that cannot bite and chew properly.
Worst of all is the fact that there seems to be an idea underpinning all of this that everyone can be beautiful, which is untrue. Beauty is in fact not democratically distributed—just like height, intelligence, and athleticism, we are not all equally blessed. This downstream effect of this democratic notion of beauty is that people begin to diminish other qualities such as intelligence, kindness, generosity, sense of humour etc. Truly beautiful girls, who are born with it, get very few if any cosmetic procedures done, wash their faces with water, and can still turn heads when they walk down the street. Such people exist, and they are not everyone.
It is only a society that over-values physical beauty that pretends everyone can become this “natural beauty”. Ironically, they are the feminists and the leftist minded women who think this way because like the rest of their worldviews, they did not actually rationally arrive at their opinions, but rather absorbed them from their environment like brainless sea sponges.
If the aim of beauty was to be loved, then this generation is failing because everyone is lonelier than ever. What was the point of all that looksmaxxing if you are still alone at the end of the night, with no one to tell your secrets to and no one to dream of the future with.
“If I get a little prettier can I be your baby. You tell me ‘life isn’t that hard’”
Lana del Rey
But the story of Aesop can bring us so much wisdom with this discussion. Reaching forward from two millennia in the past, Aesop tells us that true beauty is not skin deep...literally. The horse proclaims in his fable, “Groom me less, feed me more”. Beauty and health are intrinsically linked.
In our modern world, where so many women are obsessed with beauty to the point of incurring serious debt and spending hours of their time getting various cosmetics and procedures, women are nevertheless the most metabolically unhealthy generation to have ever lived.
This is evidenced by the fact that women’s fertility is the lowest it has ever been, and this is especially true for wealthier women in the world. If women are looking after themselves so well, how can this be? They have access to endless quantities of the best food, and have to do less physical labour than any of their ancestors. By all metrics we should be the healthiest we’ve ever been, right?
This is because the beauty that the modern woman is obsessed with is not true beauty, but rather a mimetic beauty. The modern girl is not training her eye to appreciate what a real beauty looks like, but rather training herself to ape whatever the most socially popular girl is doing.
For women, social popularity is of the utmost importance in a way that can only be compared to the importance of physical fighting ability for men. Popularity matters to girls and much of female behaviour is downstream of this principle.
When girls see someone with a particular face, and a particular body, wearing particular clothes, and she is extremely “popular”, they do not sit and assess objectively whether she is truly beautiful, but rather how successful she is socially and this they conflate with beauty. This explains the difference between “girl pretty” and “guy pretty”.
One of the most deleterious consequences of mimetic beauty is that many women are metabolically unhealthy. They mimic “fit girls” they see on instagram who likely under-eat essential nutrients and aim for such a low body fat percentage that they end up infertile. In this way, they don’t appeal to the male gaze which optimizes for fertility, but rather for the homosexual gaze or the female gaze which is to say, for social capital. They hyper-stress themselves in careers and lives that are socially promoted among other women as being high status and winning popularity. They lead lifestyles for the aesthetic they produce rather than consider their health impact. This is evidenced by the fact that the majority of these women must use IVF or other fertility technology to have a child as they cannot get pregnant naturally. They are not actually “fit”, they are merely “aesthetic”.
But when your nails are always painted, you never get to see what they really look like. The condition of your real, natural nails can tell you so much about the quality of your health. When your face is always covered in twenty five products, you cannot tell how healthy your body is because ill health in your diet and lifestyle shows up on your face. Cosmetics hide signals that your body sends you about your health. And if it is ageing that you are attempting to conceal, perhaps you ought to consider what kind of life you’re living that makes you cling to your youth. Happy people age happily as well and aren’t worried they wasted their lives.
Aesop’s principle of true beauty as health is the only hope we have of recalibrating ourselves to real beauty once again. There is a glow that a healthy woman has on her face which is undeniably beautiful and this glow is not diminished with age. She is not only nourishing her body well, but she is also nourishing her mind and her spirit well.
The beauty industry wants our money and social media profits from our attention. But if it is true beauty we are after, we must look deeper than superficial cures, which can create a good illusion, but ultimately, are only illusions.
A note to my dear readers,
I don’t know if you have noticed but I’ve changed the structure of my posting format such that every new post will be free for the first week for everyone to read and then the following week, it will be behind a paywall. I am trying this out to see if it suits readers better because it allows them to get a glimpse of my work, and it benefits paying subscribers because they then have full access to the archive to read whenever they want!
I am happy to hear your suggestions and recommendations if you drop me an email or a DM on substack.
Thank you once again for reading!
Love, Megha