Confusing Glamor with Beauty

At the laundromat, a stocky Hispanic man folded the tiny trousers of his little son, perhaps about three, who stayed close to his legs, saying “Papa, Papa.” The mother beside them was short, in a see-thru shirt, her hair bound up in a knot at her neck, energetically folding towels. The clothes and polyester blankets they were folding were cheap, chosen mostly for utility. Many of them were “swag,” emblazoned with names, “LA Dodgers” or “Pink.” 

This family was beautiful, but they didn’t know it. If they noticed me watching them as I folded my own clothes, they might have been self-conscious. The little boy stared. It was their world, after all. The three televisions placed around the room all played Spanish-language stations. Big fans on the ceiling pushed air through. The lady who manages the place came with her wet mop. We always greet each other, but I know she is also most comfortable in Spanish.

Whenever I am in public places I often choose a person or group of people to watch, to try to imagine their lives from what I can see of them. And I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty. Why do we confuse beauty with glamor? Why do we let sleek magazines, social media and celebrities stand for beauty? Glamor, defined as exciting or mysterious attractiveness, can be bought. That makeup, those beautiful teeth, the lustrous hair and sculpted bodies become camera-ready with a lot of work and money. And it seems that is what the modern world sees as beauty in humans.

In the “candy store” model of the world, in which goods are spread out in front of us, food, drink, books, movies, art, and we get to pick what we “like,” we are all connoisseurs, judges and critics. But the candy store runs on a profit motive. And who gets that profit? Don, a dedicated union member, says, with his usual hyperbole,  “We are a nation who cannot wait to get up in the morning and FedEx our wealth to the rich guy.” And thus we venerate those who have the money to spend on themselves and bring out their natural beauty. There’s a charisma about it. We want to be in their presence, or at least watch them.

Healthy people are always beautiful, but they may not know how to hold themselves in front of a camera. So cameras and media production have become part of the creation of what looks beautiful (i.e. glamorous) to us. Glamor must be reduced to two dimensions and reproduced in the millions.

But there is another way to look at human beauty, to distinguish it from the surface glamor reproduced and pushed to our social feeds. It isn’t even “in the eye of the beholder,” as we were so blithely told. Rather, beauty is an objective principle, which we can train ourselves to see. True beauty arrests us, brings tears to our eyes.

“Beauty is the creative principle of the universe,” says Frederick Turner in Beauty: the Value of Values [published 1991]. “It’s the feedback process that generates an ordered world with a chaotic boundary in time.” Further, he says, “it must also be the fundamental source and hallmark of truth … and at the core of our moral conscience.”

It is thus I was seeing the Hispanic family, humbly folding their laundry, with their little son looking on. In all of our flower forms, we express and bloom where we are planted. As a girl, I did not see my own family’s beauty. We were focused on being good kids, with inner lives, our souls being more important than how we looked. The “candy store” hadn’t kicked in yet. My parents brought us up to revere nature’s beauty. The Victorian idea that “children should be seen and not heard,” was often cited. And I was ever reminded that “you are not the only pebble on the beach!”

Of course I am affected by how beauty is defined by our modern world. Who doesn’t want to have attractive people around them? But I do try to see beauty as a generative principle and part of the amazing diversity which results from sexual reproduction. Our mammal brains have been very resourceful (no thanks to our neocortex, which is happy to define hierarchies and reproduce prejudice), happily mating and enjoying the beautiful results. Nature opts for beauty, for what works. If oddities result, well perhaps they also have their use.

Asian beauty ideals seem to appreciate some imperfection, to set off real beauty. Wabi-sabi ideals, or the appreciation of what is incomplete, imperfect or transient, apply to architecture, ceramics and even life. But I think Asians are just as apt as we are to try for human perfection in what gets into magazines and movies.

In the spring, in early May, I was fed many photos of the dresses worn on New York’s “biggest night of fashion,” the gala held for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was somewhat appalled by these highly constructed gowns worn by sleek celebrities, the work of many people and hours of attention. They looked ugly, superfluous. At the same time the photos coming out of Gaza were full of hungry children and Israel was threatening to invade Rafah. It all seemed quite a sad juxtaposition.

Why do we confuse beauty with glamor? It is another aspect of the corrupting “candy store,” of how we have allowed ourselves to become passive, bored with the mundane and enslaved by extreme activities and manufactured beauty. True beauty is everywhere. You can find it in your own family, or at the laundromat!