Beauty

-Edit: Last night, for the first time since I posted this, I read it again. It's awful, poorly written and boring. I don't know what I was thinking. I would delete it, but I'll leave it up as a reminder: the best thing about mistakes is that you can learn something from them-


You have to be beautyful.
To be happy.
At all costs.
This is one of the messages that is hammered daily into our heads, It triggers behaviours that sustain several multy million dollar industries.
The thing is, I could almost agree with the core principle: the world, today's world in particular, needs more Beauty.
Unforunately, Beauty is a concept that is difficult to frame, hard to measure, and challenging, at best, to manufacture. No need to worry though, because there are plenty of people out there that are making our life easier by breaking the code of Beauty, to give it back to us in simple formulas that will guarantee success (and by pure chance, can all be purchased, I guess we really are lucky!).
That's how beauty becomes a lotion to remove wrinkles, or getting breast implants, or a major surgery to have your legs chopped and extended by a handful of inches, to be taller, because everybody knows tall is beautyful. This is what really hit me, seeing how in China that surgery is considered the thing to do, and those who can afford it, and be out of commission for over a year, and endure great pain (and risk), dive right in.
Regardless of the outcome, I have a hard time believing this has anything to do with Beauty.
Perhaps it's jus me....actually it's certainly just me, seeing how most people are aligned with the general idea (without the extremes of the surgery). Still, I'd like to give my interpretation of Beauty, to explain my position a little better. When I was in school, one of the first "rules" they had us learn was: "there's no recipe for good design". Now that I work in the US, where everything is carefully executed following some 'process' that is supposed to ensure repeatable success, that sentence stands out like an eye sore. I do see, day in and day out, the benefits of processes (not really my thing, but they work), but then why can't we have a formula for good design? An easy, 10 steps process that inevitably leads to a good design? To use an analogy that fits, you can give the same recipe to 5 different people, and the outcome will be 5 different dishes: some will be good, in different ways, some will be awful, despite the fact that the steps on the recipe were followed accurately. Part of the reason is, I believe, that design (just like cooking) deals with Beauty. To help explain this point though, I'd like to swap the term Beauty, which we generally associate with some cosmetic quality. Instead we'll use Harmony, or if you can think of some other term that speaks to the deeper qualitites of Beauty, just substitute it from now on. Easy to see now how the "10 easy steps to good design" get a little more complex, not only you have to go through each step in detail, but you also have to control that every element in the process, and the process itself, stay harmonious, concept that (unless we're talking sound waves) is not easy to grasp for everybody, and even harder to explain. This is more the realm of intuition than reason, and not everybody is in touch with that sphere.
This is why you can have a woman (or a man, of course I speak from my angle) that has beautyful eyes, cheek bones, hair, legs, brests, hands and feet, but the overall effect is somehow "off": all the ingredients are there, but they still don't add up to "Beauty". This is also why plastic surgery does not guarantee success.
At the same time you can have someone with average, or even less than average, features, but when put all together the total effect is much better than the sum of the parts. All this, in my mind, has to do with Harmony. and I'm not just talking about a formal quality here: there's also harmony of body and soul (I know, it sounds deep and cheesy at the same time): someone who fells good about him/herself is more likely to express Beauty that someone that doesn't, at least that has been my experience.
Then again, perhaps nothing I just wrote makes any sense to you. We can agree to disagree.
I already wrote too much for one time anyway.
Mahalo