Beauty — just a form of expression.

Anvita Sudarshan
5 min readMar 11, 2024

Nothing more, nothing less.

Because let’s be real. Let’s simplify things. Let’s just bring it all back down to the basics.

For centuries, we have done this. Praise up some physical beauty high to the highest heavens, then tear into the other for attempting to get there. It’s ridiculous, to say the least. But that’s the stuff any civilisation is made of. To tell the truth, we do that for quite a lot of things. Not just beauty. But I happen to specialise in the latter. So that is what we are going to talk about. We’re going to talk about something very simple and primitive and the monster that we have turned it into.

Beauty. Let me define it first. I give a plethora of dictionary definitions in my book (Beauty Queen — Pathway to Pageantry. This is the link if you don’t have a copy yet) just trying to arrive at one consolidated version of it. And the best I can do is this : Beauty is anything that is pleasing to the eye. That’s it. And that is only because we are talking mainly about physical/visual beauty here. If it were a piece of music, or the murmuring of a stream, one would say — anything that pleases the ear. That is aural beauty. Or anything that pleases the touch. Or the tongue. Tweak it to fit the sensory organ of your choice. And that is what beauty is.

Of course, there is a lot of what goes on behind that eye in that little mass of muscle that we call the brain. A lot of biases, prejudices, conditioning etc. are hardwired in there, which we conveniently term as our personality. Or, if we’re feeling generous, we might call them our influences, perhaps. But if you are able to override all of that, then perhaps, just perhaps — you might get to experience true beauty. That’s really all that there is to it. And it’s beautiful.

Recently, I was speaking at an event. And when we opened the conversation up to the audience, one person had a question that personally, even I have found hard to answer sometimes in a way that would satisfy my conscience. She asked me : Why should we not ban beauty pageants? Isn’t the process of making a bunch of girls in their prime strut down the ram to judge them on their physical attractiveness a tad bit demeaning to them? The word she used was — meat market. But that does feel quite extreme. So I have taken the liberty of toning down the tonality of what she said.

I did answer what I did at that moment — comparing beauty to intelligence and beauty pageants to exams. The only real difference there is that one is mandatory and the other is not. And don’t give me that crap about talent and hard work. Talent is something you’re born with, just like beauty. You either have it or you don’t. And if you have it, you can hone it, and perfect it with some hard work. Again, just like beauty.

The only other difference is that one is deemed useful to society, and the other — not.

And that brings us to the crux of the matter really.

As long as something is of use, it is good. It is treasured. As soon as it is not — it is worthless, to be thrown away.

That really says a lot about how we perceive beauty — especially female beauty (because let’s face it, male pageants exist — but no one calls them a meat market).

So as much as I hate to label things so, certain things really do come down to how a society is structured. Most societies place a value upon anything tangible, from stones to skills to humans. And in this, how we value humans is perhaps the most interesting and complex of the lot. We value humans by their skills, their intelligence, their capacity to contribute constructively to society and finally, by their ability to propagate the human race.

The last, in fact, is singularly responsible for the booming wedding industry, and more subtly, to how we value or rank our humans.

And that is how we have learnt to evaluate our beauty standards. The ideal beauty, after all, by most people’s standards is young, trim, with the perfect hourglass figure, without a single blemish on her.

But why are we focusing only on women here? Because unfortunately, most of our societies developed as patriarchal societies. And that means that while a man is judged traditionally by his ability to provide, a woman is judged traditionally by how well she would do in the marriage market. And so beauty now became female-centric. Simply because in these societies that we developed, very little commercial value could be placed on male beauty.

Female beauty on the other hand was a different story. We managed to place a value on it. But it was an uncontrolled stock market. The value of a certain beauty was entirely dependant on the viewer. It became something that could take us to the highest of heights, and equally drop us from there as well. It turned into the most fickle of currencies. Perhaps that is the only reason both men and women look at beauty so suspiciously. Perhaps that is why we wish to remove it from the equation entirely.

And then when something like a beauty pageant comes up, it naturally worries us even more. Because, ultimately, pageants are nothing but the process of active ranking and valuation of beauty.

But does the answer really lie in banning and controlling beauty?

Isn’t the desire to be beautiful, to be desirable, intrinsic to us, an undeniable part of our psyche? By denying it, are we doing ourselves a favour or are we depriving ourselves?

Now let me get personal. I like being beautiful. I like adorning myself. For the same reason that our ancestors did. It makes one feel good. My ritual of getting ready every morning is an outlet of my creativity. I like planning my outfits, my accessories. Every day that I spend half an hour in front of the mirror getting ready boosts my creativity.

For me, my beauty is not of commercial value, or borne out of vanity. It is simply an expression of my psyche.

Taking it a step further, my beauty pageants were also an extension of the same. I was good at something, and I just wanted to take it further. Is that not a natural feeling?

Perhaps we need to be a little kinder to ourselves. Just because you focus on the external a little doesn’t denote complete superficiality. Just because you like the way you look doesn’t denote complete vanity. Just because you like experimenting with beauty doesn’t denote complete patriarchy. Not always, that is. There are always circumstances (possible more often than not) where it does. But that is where our discriminatory intelligence must be put to use.

Other than that, chances are you are just being you. It just so happens that your form of expression happens to be beauty. And there is nothing wrong with that.

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Anvita Sudarshan
Anvita Sudarshan

Written by Anvita Sudarshan

Author, Organic Farmer and Co-Founder of Silverfish Books Buy 'Beauty Queen' at https://www.amazon.in/dp/9390924103/

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