Era of diet glamour/beauty/sparkle

You know what you need, but the option you are reaching isn't fulfilling that need.

The human need for beauty is real; already the ancient Greek philosophers tried to tell us this. Recognising this need and attempting to fulfil it has implications for your well-being, as does ignoring it.

Beauty isn’t a word or a concept used in fashion anymore. We are much more comfortable with irony or subversiveness. There is this elitist connotation attached to beauty all of a sudden, as if beauty would now be something that is too hard for mere mortals to comprehend. It’s best not to use the word, for fear of alienating the consumers. Calling something beautiful, or saying that something has beauty, is excluding something, and that is unacceptable in the era of make-shift inclusivity. So, to not overcomplicate the matter, I’ll refer to this phenomenon as “sparkle”.

If you think about “sparkle”, how present is it in your life? And what is it that we are doing to try to get that into your life? Not necessarily very consciously, this sparkle hunt is a very unconscious business. For example, a well-lit department store, a luxury boutique, or even a fast-fashion retailer, these places are very curated, very appealing, very organised. Whereas if you look at your own home surroundings. When you look at social media, these sorts of aesthetically pleasing, curated, sparkly things.

One might even say that that is why men being dubbed as being highly visual and appreciating beautiful women dressed frivolously, that it is because they have denied themselves the expression of that need. That they then have to just consume the sparkle of someone else.

And here we come to this, whether you are just consuming sparkle or if you are actively contributing to expressing the sparkle in your own life. I know people who make art who still struggle from this lack of sparkle. So it’s not necessarily about art, even though I’m sure enjoying culture and making art can’t hurt in this instance.

Especially in terms of getting dressed, this sort of need for beauty and need for sparkle, we are trying to get it from buying and going to these environments, whether it’s online or offline. Trying to get a little piece of it for ourselves by buying. Then, when we think of our lives, how actively are we trying to foster that sparkle? By expressing the sparkle ourselves, putting on outfits, and trying on different things. That is then the part that feels more difficult, and less like a solution for this need for sparkle.

Since our environment and society currently are set up so that this quite fast overflow of sparkle is coming at us at a pace that it’s making it quite cheap. We are not able to have the richness of beauty and sparkle, but we are because of how the system is set up, only getting this cheap diet version of this experience.

The antidote to this is going against the grain a little bit and thinking: how can I express sparkle? How can I be a part of it? How can I manufacture it by expressing myself, rather than consuming? Expressing the sparkle, that’s what’s going to make you feel good. To feel like this need is being satisfied, rather than just constantly trying to fulfil it and not getting anywhere.