WIRED FOR BEAUTY

More than Skin Deep

Beauty is one of the few ideals that can inspire admiration and criticism in the very same breath, depending on how it’s applied, the context, and whether it’s judged to be superficial—or not.

I’ve always been instinctively drawn to beauty. Not simply to how something looks, but to how beauty makes us feel and the way it shapes the environments we live in. In many ways, I’ve built both my life and my career around celebrating it. Which is perhaps why it felt only fitting to open this article with a selfie. Not because I think I’m beautiful, but because we so often reduce beauty to what we see in the mirror, and it’s so much more. I think beauty is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the human experience we have.

Having said that, I’d be remiss, especially as a woman, if I didn’t acknowledge beauty’s very real cultural challenges. The beauty industry, luxury, commerce, and social media have, in many ways, distorted its meaning, creating a disproportionate value system that often overshadows beauty’s rightful place in our lives. There’s a difference between beauty and beauty standards, and I think we’ve spent a long time confusing the two.

More on where we went off course shortly. But first, here’s the question that made me want to write this article.

This is the question at the heart of not only beauty, but of some of our deepest instincts.

The answer may be one of the oldest clues to what makes us human.

CIVILIZED

Anthropology and the Beauty Paradox

One of the questions that has fascinated anthropologists for decades is why early humans devoted such precious time and resources to creating beautiful things when evading danger and simply staying alive demanded nearly all of their energy.

Long before modern ideas of being civilized, before cities, governments, or even written language existed, our ancestors were piercing shells to wear as beads, grinding red ochre into pigment to decorate their bodies, engraving intricate patterns into stone and bone, while creating ceremonial artifacts, jewelry, textiles, and more. They were painting the walls of caves—the dwellings they lived in—and making objects to surround themselves with and share. None of these were essential to survival, yet they created and collected them anyway.

They served something far less tangible but equally important: identity, ritual, belonging, and spirituality. They represented meaning.

The chronology is what makes the archaeological record so compelling. Beauty didn’t come after prosperity, leisure, or civilization. It was there from the beginning. While humans were solving the practical challenges of finding food, seeking shelter, and staying alive, they were also finding ways to express themselves through beauty.

You have to ask why beauty was so instinctive—so fundamental—that people devoted energy to it when life and survival were hardly guaranteed.

At the very least, it tells us beauty isn’t superficial or somehow separate from our instincts. Human history, in fact, seems to suggest almost the opposite. Beauty wasn’t an indulgence that came later; it was woven into the human experience from the very beginning. It helped people communicate who they were, what they believed, where they belonged, and what they valued long before those ideas could ever be written, or probably spoken.

Perhaps that’s why beauty has endured across every civilization, every culture, and every era. It was never merely decoration. It has always been one of humanity’s oldest forms of self-expression, and one of our earliest ways of expressing both individual identity of our tribe—or today, our community.

ADORNED

The Original Social Status

If beauty was one of humanity’s oldest instincts, adornment may have been one of its earliest expressions.

Long before fashion houses, beauty brands, or even clothing as we know it, people were decorating themselves. It turns out this ancient tradition predates civilization itself. It was one of humanity's earliest rituals.

Shell necklaces, beads, pigments, tattoos, elaborate hairstyles, piercings, ceremonial dress, jade jewelry, feathers, precious stones, and so much more have appeared across civilizations for thousands of years. Men and women wore them. Warriors, royalty, priests, leaders, and everyday people all participated in this same deeply human instinct.

Through a modern lens, it’s tempting to view adornment as simply about attractiveness. But anthropologists suggest something much more interesting. Adornment was symbolic.

It communicated identity before it communicated attractiveness. It signaled belonging before it signaled status. It expressed belief before it expressed wealth. Over time, and across different cultures, it also came to communicate age, achievement, kinship, spirituality, and yes, sometimes mate selection. But from the beginning, it was one of the earliest ways people distinguished themselves and expressed their identity within a group.

What our long-ago ancestors chose to wear, carry, paint, weave, or place upon their bodies or adorn their homes with became beauty itself—its own language.

Fashion and beauty trends may be today’s most visible expression of this ancient ritual of adornment, but it’s only one expression of it. The combination of the clothes we choose, the jewelry we purchase or inherit, the watch we wear every day, a wedding ring, a tattoo, even the way we style our hair continues to communicate something before we ever say a word.

The visual vocabulary has changed some. The instinct for beauty hasn’t.

BEAUTY IS INFORMATION

The Hidden Code

Beauty has never simply been about aesthetics.

It tells us something about the people who create it, the people who preserve it, and the people who are drawn to it. Along with identity and belonging, it communicates care. Every beautiful object, place, or tradition contains clues about what an individual, a family, or an entire civilization valued enough to create and protect.

Think about what archaeologists uncovered thousands of years ago—and what they’ll discover a thousand years from now. Computers, laptops, and countless phones may be among the artifacts they find, but it’s the objects, the talismans of our time on earth, the remnants of where we lived, the jewelry, pottery, and china, the art, the tools and machinery crafted with extraordinary precision and technology, that will tell our story. The beauty a civilization leaves behind often becomes the clearest record of who its people were.

Nothing has changed in this regard.

A monument, a public garden, a restored brownstone, a well-worn leather chair that belonged to a grandfather, a perfectly curated book collection, even a family recipe passed down for generations, all quietly communicate something about us.

Beauty leaves clues. Evidence. It always has.

Perhaps that’s why we’re so instinctively drawn to it. We aren’t simply responding to what we see. We’re responding to beauty as a proxy for the people who created it, what it reveals about them—and, whether we realize it or not, about ourselves.

The expression of beauty is so deeply wired into our identity that it's virtually impossible not to recognize its persistence throughout our lives. It’s the information—the code—by which we register ourselves, others, and everything around us.

THE HIGH BAR

Beauty vs. Beauty Standards

Beauty and beauty standards are not the same thing. Beauty standards are cultural. Beauty itself is anthropological.

One changes with every generation, every market, every platform. The other has remained remarkably constant throughout human history.

Throughout centuries, the ideal body, face, hairstyle, clothing, and complexion have all changed dramatically. Every civilization has created its own version of beauty. Ours is no different. What’s different is the speed.

For most of human history, beauty standards evolved slowly, often over generations. Today they’re rewritten almost daily by algorithms, advertising, celebrity culture, and social media. Trends no longer emerge over decades. They can emerge—and disappear—in weeks.

It’s an impossible standard for women, and increasingly for men too. But perhaps this isn’t a failure of modern culture so much as a feature of it. Commerce depends on novelty. Technology accelerates novelty. The faster standards change, the faster attention shifts—and the more opportunity there is to sell us the next version of beauty.

But beauty itself is something altogether different. It endures.

It’s why we’re moved by music we don’t understand, architecture from civilizations we’ve never lived in, paintings created centuries before we were born, or landscapes that stop us in our tracks. It’s why we instinctively respond to harmony, balance, craftsmanship, and proportion, even when no one else is watching.

The ancient instinct never disappeared. We’ve just layered modern expectations on top of it.

Beauty standards change. Beauty doesn’t.

Perhaps that’s where we’ve become confused. We’ve mistaken beauty standards for beauty itself, when one is a cultural invention, constantly rewritten by its era, and the other is one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring instincts.

LIFE CHANGING

Beauty and Awe

If beauty once helped humans communicate who they were, today it continues to shape how we experience the world.

Think about the last time you stood before an extraordinary landscape, walked into a cathedral, listened to a piece of music that gave you goosebumps, or entered a room that immediately made you feel calm. None of those experiences changed your circumstances. They changed you.

Psychologists call one of those responses awe—the feeling of encountering something so vast, beautiful, or extraordinary that it momentarily quiets the mind and expands our perspective. It is one of the most profound emotional states humans experience, reminding us that beauty isn’t merely something we admire. It’s something we feel.

Our surroundings affect us in quiet ways too. One of the most famous studies in environmental psychology found that hospital patients recovering from surgery healed faster, required less pain medication, and experienced fewer complications when their windows overlooked trees instead of a brick wall. Nothing about their medical treatment changed. Their environment did. That single view of nature altered their experience of healing.

Perhaps that’s why every civilization has created gardens, sacred spaces, architecture, music, art, and places designed to inspire wonder. Beauty has always done more than decorate our lives. It has shaped our emotional lives.

Which brings us home.

The spaces we create, the objects we choose to live with, the music we fill our homes with, and the natural world we invite into our everyday lives aren’t luxuries reserved for special occasions. They quietly influence how we think, how we feel, and ultimately, how we live.

Beauty has never been the finishing touch. It has always been part of the foundation, the very architecture of our lives.

MODERN BEAUTY

Stands The Test of Time

If beauty is one of humanity’s oldest instincts, perhaps it’s also one of our greatest opportunities.

Every single day we make hundreds of decisions that shape the quality of our lives. Beauty exists in so many of them: the people we spend time with, the music we listen to, the clothes we reach for, the objects we keep, and the homes we create. None of these choices are insignificant. Together, they become our experience—the architecture of us.

And just as we experience the architecture and beauty of others, they experience ours.

Beauty isn’t frivolous or reserved for artists, designers, or aesthetes. It’s part of being human, whether we recognize it or not. It’s one of the most powerful ways we experience the world.

It’s why music—or perfect stillness—can quiet an anxious mind, why certain places stay with us forever, and why the objects we choose to live with often become the stories we hand down.

That’s the real case for beauty. It’s not someone else’s standard to pursue. It’s our very own instinct to honor.