The meaning of beautification

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Yes, there is no doubt that everyone does it. Every person is beautified in a certain way, and if they completely reject it, we spontaneously and immediately worry about that person.

Already in a fever, Hamlet accuses Ophelia with the words: "God have given you one face and you make yourselves another" (though not only is this in the plural, therefore, it refers to all women and not to her alone, but it is also possible that it's just a metaphor for honesty). However, we should not harbor illusions that such exclusivity makes sense. All of us, in different ways and to different extents, beautify something about ourselves and ourselves, in order to influence the impression we leave on others. So one author from New York stopped washing her hair, put on dirty clothes and went to a psychiatric hospital. She did not have any clear symptoms of mental disorders. Of course they kept her for treatment. However, the official diagnosis was certainly not – F0.0 Non-beautification.

TATTOOED BODIES, COLORFUL FLOWERS

Psychological research shows unequivocally - people who are perceived by others as attractive are treated better in various social situations, and most often they don't have to make any effort or even have a desire or intention to get something. And most people notice it in their everyday life, and many desire such a social status. But in the era when our minds and identities were shaped by television - that is, even before social networks existed - didn't we pay too much attention to the visual aspects of the entire world, including people, and to the beautification and development and application of techniques with which help should we achieve that?

Beautification techniques have been developed for so long that it seems like they have been around people forever. We find depictions of made-up faces, tattooed bodies, and dyed hair in paintings thousands of years old. At the same time, these and similar behaviors are present in almost all cultures even today. If nothing else, almost all people at least cut their hair, beard and nails, wear special clothes for festive occasions, bathe on Saturdays so that they are not gossiped about in church the next morning. We can go further than this. We believe that some animal species are colorful or sing particularly well because it is a mechanism by which they draw attention to themselves. It could even be said that in a similar way, flowers attract bees with the colorfulness of their petals, without which they can hardly ensure pollination and survival. One gets the impression that beautification is everywhere and in nature.

SOCIAL GAMES AND HUMAN FLEXIBILITY

In the case of humans, however, there is an essential addition of intention. A bird is born like that, willy-nilly, it cannot choose and decide. People change their beautification strategies depending on age, seasons, fashion trends, days of the week, occasions and circumstances. We also believe that we make our own decisions, and this is where you can see how flexible we are.

The idea of ​​fashion, for example, seems more unusual than we usually pay attention to. I should wait for someone to tell me what they will be able to impose on a large group of people as desirable for dressing in a few months, then wouldn't I myself "want" to wear exactly that!? That board game (if the above sentence sums it up well), logically speaking, makes absolutely no sense. Does anyone really want to belong, in any capacity, to any monolithic group, even if their point of cohesion is that they have money and time to waste?! By the way, listening to songs in the charts, for example, is the same thing - someone explains to me which music I should like better than which (no, of course, and why), as if ranking and imposition can exist as ideas in the art world .

It is also interesting that some trends are supposed to be subversive in relation to the world of fashion, but they repeat the same logic. At a fairly clearly defined moment, in the mid-nineties of the last century, it became important to have a piercing in Belgrade. Even before the end of the summer semester, no one had an "earring on their nose", by the September deadline, they were everywhere. But the real interesting thing was something else - everyone claimed that it was an individual decision, "I like it that way", and not a silent dictate of fashion industry. Not so long ago, tattoos were limited to the date and place, sometimes a small anchor next to them, purely to imprint the trauma of military service on the skin and remain forever with the bearer, and here and there you could also meet some variation on the theme "Ljuba , my husband". Today, elaborate tattoos are widespread, there is an "art of the tattoo", and many athletes hardly have a piece of skin that is not covered in ink.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF BEAUTIFULNESS

Recently, two big American businesses have spread across Europe: gyms and nail salons. While the first, even among middle-aged and elderly people, may have to do with health care, the others are aimed exclusively at beautification and seem to be increasingly popular. In some countries, it seems especially in Latin America, surgical interventions with the aim of correcting the appearance or rejuvenation are a regular thing, and at one time in Serbia there were newspaper articles about how parents are increasingly giving their daughters breast augmentation surgery for their eighteenth birthday. When you take all this together, it seems that the whole "beauty industry" is at stake and that there is no more time or space to question its meaning.

At this point, the theme of this "Inner Voice" connects with last week's. Embellishments, it is too often seen, cross the border of good taste and look grotesque or at least too striking, which actually achieves the opposite effect to that which was aimed for. From this it is clearly seen that all investments in external beautification are in vain if the internal work of refining the taste is not done.

What could be the psychological meaning of all this? Why do we agree to all this and participate in it? Of course, the routine interpretation would be that we are using the external to try to fix the internal state. In this case, to embellish our appearance because we do not accept and respect ourselves as a person. It's more likely, though, that it's all about hope, a promise as powerful as it is risky. And it says that others will perceive us as more attractive potential partners (as is the case with colorful birds), which should allow, in the old days, to choose with which of several candidates to give birth and raise children, i.e., today, to easier to secure a one-night stand or gain popularity. Another hope is that thanks to beautification we will not lose our youthful appearance, that we will defeat time and aging, somehow cheat mortality, although, at best, we can only delay them a little.

To us, the obsession with beautification seems to be taken for granted today, but until recently it wasn't like that at all. Less than a hundred years ago, Freud worried that our world (and America's more than any other society known to him) was in danger of being too civilized (read: neurotic), of being replaced by the power of instinctual desire, in this case sexual obsession with the objects of that desire (for example, media stars that one perceives as extremely attractive). If this makes sense - and Freud died before the advent of television - then any effort to beautify ourselves further weakens the natural function of the drive. It sounds crazy, but beautification seems to stem not only from the fear that I am not interesting enough for those I find attractive, but also from the fact that with each generation sex becomes more and more boring, so something constantly needs to be added to it (from fantasies and costumes, to props and substances ).

The book that predicted all this is The art of love Eric Fromm, an author whose every book has sold more than a million copies, and this one has reached twenty-five. Unfortunately, the title of the book was difficult to translate into Serbo-Croatian, and The Art of Loving he should have emphasized that the obsession with making someone love us should be replaced by the development of the capacity to love, a capacity that he sees as a special form of art. At the end of the fifties of the last century, when television was in its infancy, Fromm predicted that an age would come when love and inner personal values ​​would be overshadowed by sex appeal, and a person's "social value" would be reduced to what a person possesses and how they look.

THE BEAUTY OF SCARS

What could be said about this today? What should inner beauty be and does it really (still) exist? More and more often, the term "working on yourself" is used for this, in the sense of personal development, learning, getting to know yourself, spirituality or psychotherapy. And although all that, and much more, can be ways to inner beauty, it is not in them, it is not in specific actions or efforts.

In an unusual interview, probably the greatest musician of the twentieth century, explaining how cellists suffer more than pianists or violinists, in bad English, triumphantly says: "But because we suffer, we are beautiful!!" Inner beauty isn't about knowing the lyrics by heart, it isn't even about generosity or self-sacrifice (although those can all be nice additions to it). Although it never has to be talked about and we don't even have to be aware of it, as the inner beauty of another person we perceive the integrated mental pain, one's capacity to live cheerfully and optimistically despite losses, that from someone, metaphorically speaking, light shines despite the shadows of experience .

Different types of beauty are not only not necessarily related, they may even be mutually exclusive. While beautification is aimed at covering up all the flaws in the appearance, what matters in the inner world is what remains beautiful even when the scars are not removed. However, the most important thing could be not to lose balance - beautification is a natural impulse, but our whole life must not be reduced to waist circumference and jawline exercises.

The author is a psychologist