Hairy problem.
I handed a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio to the lady at Supercuts.
“I want to look like this,” I said, my teenage voice cracking.
She didn’t have the heart to tell me the truth.
Another time, I told the dentist my teeth whitening gel wasn’t working.
“You want your teeth to be as white as this piece of paper?” he asked. “Never gonna happen. It’s genetic.”
Old ladies at church told me I was too skinny.
I had so much acne, a kid once asked me, “Are those ant bites on your face?”
Hard truth?
“Beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.”
That’s from Chuck Palahniuk’s wonderfully wild novel Invisible Monsters. The first time I read that line, I never forgot it.
I used to believe it.
Real world.
Today, a TikTok influencer says pretty much the same thing.
He taps his face with a hammer to create micro-fractures to get a more chiseled jawline.
He says everything is downwind of beauty. Kindness is secondary. Intelligence loses to it. Skill doesn’t matter. The prettier person will get the job.
People online are outraged.
But when I first heard him say that, I shrugged.
I know that feeling.
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Ugliest People in the World?
The magic tonic. The face creams. The fancy clothes.
Electrocute the hair off your back.
The best age for a facelift is 30.
These messages are on my phone, on TV, on billboards, on the sides of buses.
It works. The cosmetic industry is booming.
I’m not sure it’s harmless.
When People magazine publishes its “Most Beautiful People in the World,” are they also implying a most-ugly category?
Tell a kid.
Sometimes, to process something, I’ll imagine how I would say it to a kid.
What if a kid asked me, “Mr. Byron, am I ugly?”
Maybe I’d blurt, “Absolutely not!”
Maybe I’d stammer. Or stall—try to find out why they were asking.
But I think the truest thing would be to shrug, to try to zap the power from the question.
“People see different things,” I’d say. “I look at you and I see all the beauty in the whole universe.”
The truth.
To that influencer who says the world revolves around jawlines, I’d say: “That’s not the world I live in. That’s the world YOU live in.”
One you perpetuate.
A smaller one.
A sadder one.
One where beauty is the ultimate currency.
But like money, it only works if everyone agrees to play the game.
Looking back.
Sometimes, that “kid” I’m talking to is me.
The me in old pictures.
The me who was hopeful and smiling even in hard times.
That’s beautiful enough for me.
Let’s work. Together.
My writing workshop sold out, so I added another: Saturday, November 7, 10am PT, $89.
From my diary this week.
I saw a naked butt on Instagram and it triggered a little spiral. I learned about something called “status anxiety” and how to get over it.
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—Maggie Downs, author of Be Back By Dinner