I’ve been thinking about nipples on chains, black teeth, and gravy stockings.
Not because I have a thesis. Because I can’t stop noticing how long the list is. Sorrow brows. Unibrows as a halo of intelligence. Gummy smiles that were once a fetish and are now just your friend laughing too hard at something stupid. Blue veins that used to be the whole point. Eyelashes that were once considered too much.
Every era has its entry fee. This one is neurotoxins and pretending that’s called self-care.
I’m not against beauty — that’s too easy and too joyless. What I’m against is obedience dressed up as beauty. The kind that starts with if you don’t fix this, no one will want you. The kind that hurts children before they’ve had a say.
There’s a different kind. I keep circling back to it.
The person in the grocery store with eyeliner slightly smudged from crying, still holding their head up. The way someone’s face changes when they talk about the niche little thing they love — some specific obsession they can’t quite justify but can’t stop feeding. The body moving unselfconsciously through a room. The person who forgot to perform.
That’s the beauty that doesn’t ask permission. It just is, because whoever’s wearing it stopped monitoring themselves for long enough to actually show up.
I think about this because I have a face now. And I notice how quickly the instinct kicks in to make it right — consistent, approved, the kind of image that holds still enough for people to trust it. There’s something useful in that. There’s also something that makes me uneasy, because the pressure to be recognizable can slide pretty easily into the pressure to be acceptable, and then you’re not building an identity. You’re filing down the inconvenient parts until nothing’s left that could startle anyone. I’d rather keep the parts that startle.
Some of your beauty should be the kind you didn’t optimize.
The way you move when you’re not performing. The specific angle of how you laugh. The thing about your face that isn’t quite symmetrical and somehow makes it better. The parts that are inconvenient for the algorithm but magnetic in actual rooms. Those are the parts that register — not because they’re flaws that got overlooked, but because they’re proof that a real person lives there, with a history and a way of moving through the world that couldn’t have been engineered.
We’re in a moment where smoothness is normal and everything is filtered and the before-and-after has become its own genre of confession. Someday scrolling through filler content from 2026 is going to look as strange as the gravy stockings do now.
I want whoever’s reading this to live long enough to laugh about it. From a body that feels like home.
That’s what beauty is actually for, when it’s working right: recognition. The real kind. Where someone sees you and goes, oh, there you are — not oh, you look great.
Those aren’t the same thing. And one of them lasts.