Vanity
The beauty illusion and the curse of diminishing returns
For all its grandstanding, arrogance, undiluted bigotry, and ignorance, the Christian Bible does not state "Cleanliness is next to godliness." The quote is commonly attributed to John Wesley (1703-1791). Wesley was the founder of the Methodist Church. We may have him to thank for the compulsive bathing habits of Americans, who are only out-bathed by Brazilians. Let's take a second though to parse the statement that allegedly originates from one of Wesley's sermons. "Cleanliness is next to godliness". Not underneath; NEXT TO.
Wesley, like many Christians in his era, seemed to bank on his own entry into an eternal life in Heaven where he would sit alongside his God and presumably have as much or more authority over human beings as he did while he toiled in Meatworld. This sort of attitude is comically hubristic in my opinion and is one of the reasons I find most stripes of Christianity to be insufferable. To say cleanliness is next to godliness is almost arrogant enough to say cleanliness is the same as godliness. The implication is that circumstances that would make one dirty or ugly also make the person, place, or thing suffering those circumstances evil, cursed, or Satanic. I'm not surprised it came from a Christian preacher: it has the air of sanctimonious, paranoid, absurd frigidity about it.
In Japanese, the word kirei means both beautiful and clean. The illusion of cleanliness is that it is synonymous with beauty and beauty is always apparently clean in some key respect.
The trouble with both cleanliness and beauty in our civilization is their equation with godliness. That which is symmetrical, vital, fertile, and new reigns uber alles. Beauty is a phenomenon perceived entirely from the outside; it is naively presumed to be a perfect reflection of the truth within.
I was at the physical peak of my own beauty at age 21. Though I saw myself as a near-10 stunner, I was actually a mid with excellent grooming habits. I was also stupid: I made the grave mistake of chopping my long hair off at age 19, wanting to fit in with gamine supermodels who slouched on magazine covers. I am a gnome compared to those women -- so I hilariously worked retail to sell clothes modeled by them while imagining myself to be of the same beauty caliber as them. Not everyone is into tall girls though: for a petite woman, I qualified as a hottie back in the day, which wasn't bad for someone as naturally nerdy as me but certainly never would have made do for a local beauty contest, let alone a runway. I was pretty enough on the outside and hideous on the inside. Behind my cute facade, I was a cauldron of anger and sorrow, lying to myself and others, ungrateful, and thirsty. I find it funny when people say they want to go back to nineteen. I don't.
Nowadays, the actors who dominated my era -- Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise -- are being remade via AI. No matter how perfect you are or were, there is a computer who can invent a more perfect version of you that does a better job of squeezing the dopamine triggers that made you famous in 1983. These new AI versions are uncanny. They're more symmetrical, fuller-lipped, larger-eyed, and squarer-jawed, and cleaner in every way, yet something is off. AI always gets something wrong, like those AI-generated kitchen photos where the vase of flowers gets eaten by the ceiling fixture or the towel disappears into the wood of a cabinet. Whether AI creates a late teen hottie or a digital rendition of a "perfect" kitchen, it's always a Frankenstein's monster that looks like it slithered from the fever dreams of a few million struggling, depressed, materialist mid-wits. Probably because that is what it is.
The images of the Perfect Mate/Perfect Kitchen are neither attainable nor sustainable. They are only meant to trick us into spending inordinate amounts of money and resources. In the case of the AI hottie, the statement goes "You're not ugly, you're just poor." What this means is that only those too poor to afford multiple cosmetic procedures need to remain ugly. Warhol's prediction of everyone becoming famous for 15 minutes in the future has been limited in some respect to those who opt into having one or more cometic surgeries. One of the commonest procedures done on young women, often when they are teenage girls, is the rhinoplasty or nose job. To be honest, a smaller, straighter nose is often a vast improvement, plus the internal part of the nose job tends to involve correcting a deviated septum, which is something I suffer from.
Big Lipped Brunettes: The Three Jolies
In the realm of non-functional cosmetics, larger lips have been a trend since Angelina Jolie became famous. In order to achieve what Jolie had naturally in her youth, women and men get a slurry of hyaluronic injected into the region every 6-12 months. The chemicals create a semi-permanent state of inflammation that dissolves over time. Little did Angelina Jolie know that her lips would launch other celebrity ships. There are three examples who spring readily to mind: Megan Fox, Ssniperwolf a.k.a. Lia Shelesh, and Kylie Jenner.
Megan Fox, age 37, is an actress known mainly for being the female love interest in 2007's Transformers, a silly Michael Bay sci-fi movie that featured talking car-robots and a young Shia LeBeouf. She was considered the most beautiful woman in the world after being put on the map in her early 20s. She started modeling as a child. Lip injections seem to have been Fox's claim to fame: once she got them, she landed Transformers and the gigs kept rolling in. Only when it became self-evident that she was a prima donna did Fox start losing cache, and by that time she was famous enough to sustain herself without having to do much in the realm of actual acting.
Sssniperwolf is a YouTuber named Lia Shelesh who started off with videos about gaming in 2013. She switched her content to bland reaction videos in 2017 and was able to generate interest mainly by creating controversy and looking cute while doing it. Sssniperwolf has been arrested multiple times. She likes to steal things, hit people, and doxx those who make fun of her. Her first known mugshot in 2013 shows her without her trademark full lips. Her blow up in 2017 seems to have been synonymous with her lip enlargement.
Kylie Jenner, age 26, inspired a bizarre trend in 2015 (when she was in her own late teens) known as the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge. Her fanbase of tween and teen girls would stick their lips into empty Gatorade bottles and suck the air out, creating enough suction to temporarily engorge the lips. Jenner herself had already transformed herself from gawky teenager to the world's hottest model by getting lip fillers.
In all three cases, the rapid encroachment of age has made the three Jolies into Jokers. The original Jolie has become so dysmorphic, she famously went through a voluntary double-mastectomy because she has the breast cancer gene. To my mind, this was not far from cutting off one's hands for fear of getting a hangnail, but Hollywood gonna Hollywood. For Fox, dysmorphia has taken over her mind to the extent that she can no longer see the diminishing returns of plastic "improvements". Shelesh has yet to stay out of police stations and should probably consider where she is going to source lip fillers when she is detained in jail. Jenner is the poster child for her generation aging like milk. Because she is so gonzo about having herself carved and stabbed in the name of beauty, at age 26 she looks far older than I did as a poor, non-surgeried plebe at age 37.
I am sure I don't have to spell it out that all three Jolies are cautionary tales. For Fox, physical perfection is an addiction. Though 20 let go of her a long time ago, she clearly has not let go of it. Shelesh seems like a straight up terrible person: it's not just insecurity and dysmorphia eating at her, as it is in Fox's case. Jenner, like her older Kardashian clan sisters, is a monster of insecurity poised as a role model. For all three, the future looms and it looks like Madonna at the 2023 Grammys.
The spectacle of outer beauty carries a potent glamour. Sometimes the golden mean as reflected on the outside tells the truth about its astral, mental, and causal plane origins. Sometimes it lies.
This is sad. What ever happened to healthy being beautiful?