When does our desire to change our appearance become an attempt to earn acceptance?
Social Rejection
Survival of the fittest has become survival to ‘fit’ in. Are we really enhancing ourselves to create a gene pool or are we just blending in to become accepted?
Appearance often becomes one of the first things through which we are judged whether we acknowledge it or not. Failing to conform to the general beauty standards leads to social rejection; a closed opportunity for success. We make assumptions about people based on how they look. Our appearance becomes squared with our nationality and identity. Skin colour acts as the reference. It is the racial classifier but a really bad one. We scrutinise so much on our indifferences in minute features that we overlook how similar and related our populations actually are. What we identify as a race is actually a tool to construct divisions and justify claims of superiority. Humans seem to have an evolving appetite for competition. Perhaps this is where the survival of the fittest takes on a different meaning: not surviving but competing to belong.
Internalisation
“I’m not attractive enough.” is the conclusion we make in the face of rejection related to dating, marriage proposals, or social hierarchies. Repeated rejection can push one to internalise external beauty standards and treat them as personal shortcomings. We begin by questioning our looks then spiral into our childhood insecurities, to all the other times we were not chosen or the time we were were only picked to fit the representation.
Appearance plays a substantial factor in romantic relationships. It’s true that in order to find a mate, we need to be physically attracted to them. I’m not suggesting otherwise. What I want to question is the toxicity behind appearance that beholds us from living authentically and under our own terms.
There is a difference between being seen and being valued.
Judging someone by their clothes is so cheap, because we rarely think that one has a family to feed or that perhaps comfort is what enables productivity and mobility. Why are we too quick to judge what’s visible before taking the time to understand what lies beneath it? Why not look inside the mechanics of someone’s mind, the experiences that shaped them, and the values that ground them? We should learn to read people by their roots not their surface alone. This is the unforgotten science of simply being human.
Fixing our insecurities
I think we have all been there as insecure teens, listening to everyone around us while ignoring what our bodies really want. As an insecure teen myself, my mum would remind me to embrace my features and that skin colour was just skin. Our features make us distinct. Imagine being a clone, and knowing how their story ended.
Inclusivity has become tokenistic? I remember being told that I was only included in the school photography simply to showcase the diversity. So...skin colour is now a marketing campaign, I thought.
It is easy to be visible without having your individuality recognised or valued. Made to represent a label rather than yourself. There is a difference between being included for what you represent and being valued for who you are.
The cycle of validation
What dating apps have taught me is that we put so much emphasis on how someone looks before getting to know them. We find ourselves swiping away people who could actually have taught us something meaningful about ourselves. It has also taught me how picky we really are or perhaps selective would be the better choice of word. On the flippant side, you come to concretely understand that, yes, maybe the number of likes does suggest that someone finds you attractive. But it also reminds you that we are not made to fit everyone’s taste.
Perhaps this has something to do with our association with numbers. A like, a follow or a match becomes a proxy for desirability. To be number one in someone’s life can feel like a measure of your importance as though being chosen confirms you matter. Yet within the curated context of dating apps, these numbers fall short of measuring our overall attractiveness, compatibility and worth. The real question here is whether dating apps are teaching us to confuse being chosen with being valuable.
Reclaiming agency
We want to be wanted, we want to be needed. Above all, we want to belong. So we end up changing how we look because we believe this is what is going to make us more attractive or more likely to be accepted.
I see this in two dimensions: in one avenue this is a way of improving oneself instead of moaning and pitying ourselves - a form of quiet resilience shaping the person you desire to be. There is nothing wrong with levelling up. It only becomes toxic, however, when one consider’s themselves as self-improvement projects that need constant scrutiny in order to earn validation. Then does it only become a vicious cycle that doesn’t end with us. The standards we internalise can become expectations we pass on to future generations, where they adopt scrutiny over appreciation of who they are first. By reclaiming agency, we need to turn to the question: am I changing because I want to become a new version of myself or because who I am is not enough?
I hope this entry into a debatable topic encourages you to dig deeper and not leave scratches on a surface that did no harm to you in the first place.
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