Pretty Privilege and Facial Discrimination

 

Is there really such a thing as “pretty privilege” and “facial discrimination”? 

Of course, there is.

I experienced both. I grew up as someone people would call an “ugly duckling,” who, by the grace of God or the universe, became a graceful swan. When I was a child, other children would bully me, calling me ugly. Even though I did very well academically in school, being bullied for my looks left a deep scar on my soul. Therefore, at a very young age, I vowed to myself that I will grow up to be a beautiful lady in order to protect myself from bullies and other bad people. 

I grew up buying fashion magazines and reading beauty articles. With my mother’s help, I experimented with different kinds of accessories and clothes, which only made other kids stare at me since there were no adults around me who could teach me about beauty and fashion. I would also get teased for having acne during puberty. No matter what I did, I was perceived as an ugly, unattractive child. Experiencing social rejection because of my looks really did break my heart.

However, when I got into college, fate suddenly smiled upon me and bit by bit, I became prettier in front of the mirror and in the eyes of other people. I enjoyed being perceived as attractive while hiding my very low self-esteem and pretending to be confidently beautiful. I was eighteen. But what broke my heart again was my discovery of the fact that even though I was deemed attractive especially by the opposite sex, they only wanted to be intimate with me because of how I look. It was a crazy and confusing time for me.

Pretty privilege is real. Humans love beauty in whatever form because beauty is an outward expression of our divinity. Pretty privilege means that you are more favored, liked, and paid attention to because of your beauty. People try to be kinder to you because they like looking at you, they would like to be associated with you, or they want to have some kind of a relationship with you. However, pretty privilege could be a curse when your beauty causes jealousy, sabotage, gossip (because of all the attention towards you), and unwanted sexual desire from others. When I was young, I used to look up to beautiful and famous celebrities like Britney Spears, being naïve to the dark side of beauty and fame. But there is no harm in wanting to be beautiful. All people are beautiful, some people just have to uncover their beauty and stop underestimating themselves.

Facial discrimination can really hurt, because our looks are caused by genetic lottery. However, real beauty is seen by the heart. Our eyes can sometimes fool us, but the heart does not. My deceased grandmother (and soulmate) was not conventionally beautiful, but I have always seen her as very beautiful. Her being always reeks of beauty that whenever I look at her, the first thing I always think of was that she is beautiful. Of course it had nothing to do with her white hair and wrinkles, but whenever she smiles at me, my heart would melt and I loved to be with her all the time. Now that I am older, I realized that it was her massive inner beauty that radiates from the inside. We could not help but perceive her beauty. As the famous children’s author Roald Dahl quoted,

 

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

 

There are people who would discriminate us for our outward appearances, but they are not the type of people that we would want to be in our lives anyway. When we are lucky enough to find rare gems who see other people’s beauty through their hearts, their friendship is for keeps. That is the most important thing that I have learned in my journey of attaining beauty. Outward beauty can be helpful; but at the end of the day, that is not what will give us true happiness. It is our own perceptions of our beauty and having people around us who can see us for who we really are inside.