“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive. Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks. Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives. How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.” BeautyAdvertisingAestheticsAdvertisementsBeauty StandardsSupermodelsUnrealistic Standards Book:Stories of Your Life and Others Source: Stories of Your Life and Others
“Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [...] Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive.” BeautyPassiveAestheticsBeauty StandardsPretty GirlsPretty WomenSmart Or PrettyPassive Personality Book:Stories of Your Life and Others Source: Stories of Your Life and Others
“When you watch Olympic athletes in competition, does your self-esteem plummet? Of course not. On the contrary, you feel wonder and admiration; you're inspired that such exceptional individuals exist. So why can't we feels the same way about beauty?” Self EsteemVanityAestheticsSelf ImageBeauty StandardsSelf Esteem Or Lack Thereof Book:Stories of Your Life and Others Source: Stories of Your Life and Others
“People are nice to me because of how I like, and part of me likes that, but part of me feels guilty because I haven't done anything to deserve it.” AestheticsBeauty StandardsLookism Book:Stories of Your Life and Others Source: Stories of Your Life and Others
