on beauty

Celebrities and photo retouching have caused people to lose all perspective in terms of what good looking is. Have you noticed how you finally meet your friend’s “hot” boyfriend, and literally I have a friend who said her boyfriend was so hot that I would actually be too nervous to speak to him, and then you meet him, and he’s fine looking, he’s cute, but he doesn’t look anything like Penn Badgely. Which is shocking to you because that’s the MINIMUM of what you were expecting when you heard the word “hot.” Like that’s a normal standard to have.

Or you meet your friend’s “gorgeous” friend who she is always describing wistfully as like the “hot” one who is getting friended by strangers on Facebook, and she gets there, and you find yourself feeling so let down (and just overjoyed at the same time) because you were expecting Penelope Cruz, and why are you always expecting Penelope Cruz? Very few people are Penelope Cruz, but all these celebrity pictures that take really good looking people and then shave off half their faces and their elbows, to somehow make them more attractive is causing us to completely undervalue normal beauty.

Except that this phenomenon of being set up for hot and instead getting human, only exists because we think our friends and boyfriends are better looking than they actually are, which is very sweet in a way.