What Is Beauty?
From 44kg to Cosmetic Surgery, This Is What I've Learned
Note: This piece discusses body image, weight, and illness in detail.
One day, while at lunch in the high school cafeteria, I wondered aloud to my friend what one of the most popular seniors saw in the girl he was with since he was very attractive and she was very plain.
My immature logic having been honed on the popular culture of the 80s, I believed beautiful people only fell in love with beautiful people. To me, it seemed that love must be blind. With his Clark Kent looks, he could have had a supermodel. Instead he chose the mousey, library girl.
My friend eyed the happy and content couple and between bites of their sandwich said: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
I took a pull through the straw of my Diet Coke, pondering the wisdom of my friend.
“Did you just make that up?” I asked.
They laughed. “No, you dork. It’s from a novel by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford called Molly Bawn.”
I digested this. One, clearly I needed to read more. Two, I watched as ‘Clark Kent’ caressed his plain girlfriend’s face with devotion and felt a twinge of envy. I wanted that. I was plain. I had no idea beautiful people could fall in love with plain people. It was a pivotal moment in my life. It gave me hope.
“So,” I said, my paradigm pivoting at glacial speed, “he can see something we can’t?”
My friend nodded and took a sip from their box of Sunny Delight. “Uh-huh.”
“But what is it?” I persisted, squinting and trying to see what he could see. “What can he see I can’t see?”
“True beauty.”
And that was that. The bell rang, and we had to go to class. All through the rest of the day I worked my way through the barriers that held me back from believing a beautiful person could fall in love with a plain person.
It was at the end of French class that I finally understood. Beauty, true beauty, lies within.
And that is what we see when we fall in love. The external appearance that I had been conditioned by magazines, sitcoms, and movies to focus all my energy on achieving wasn’t the most important factor. (Which was great news for plain little me!)
It was who we are in the inside.
In hindsight, I wish I had been able to hold onto that realization, but sadly I did not. Media and cultural pressure had its way with plain little me.
Since then I have felt bad enough about myself that I have had veeners put on my teeth to straighten my smile, rhinoplasty, breast implants, botox, juvederm, eyelash extensions, and god knows what else the local salon offered to try to fix the lack in me.
And now, at last, in 2026, I’m starting to circle back to what I realized in 1986.
Beauty is who we are in the inside.
Since that day in 1986, a ton of cultural changes have changed our perception of external beauty for the better (thank the gods!). In 2026, women are no longer held hostage to a single, global standard of what is considered beautiful to the white, male gaze.
Remember that 1992 track Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-A-Lot aka Anthony Ray? It opens with two women slagging off another woman’s body shape that the track is about to praise in an unforgettable way (tell me you can’t hear the lyrics in your head right now).
What blows my mind is they were openly fat-shaming someone with a healthy body, and Sir Mix-A-Lot knew listeners would not be offended by what they said because this was the standard for beauty.
While writing this piece, I discovered Sir Mix-A-Lot wrote Baby Got Back as a backlash to “valley-girl popsickle stick figures” being the standard of feminine beauty women were judged against. He was also fed up with his then-girlfriend being repeatedly turned down for acting and modelling jobs because she was full-figured.
In an interview with Vogue, he said he wanted to call attention to the fact that women are expected to “damn near kill themselves to try to look like these beanpole models that you see in Vogue magazine.”
Back in 2006, while standing in a queue to pay for food in Notting Hill’s Marks & Spencer, I bought a copy of the magazine shown below. Celebs, en-masse were morphing into emaciated sticks. Their bodies so thin that their heads looked disproportionately large.
Some readers may remember when this was the du jour trend for female beauty. People weren’t saying: ‘omg she’s half-starved, feed her!’ it was ‘omg she is SO discplined, look how thin she is!’.
In the mid-noughties, starvation = beauty.
At that time I was engaged to a fixed-income derivatives trader who expressed his preference for women never to weigh more than 110 lbs (50 kg). By the way, I am 5’7” tall. Normal weight for that height ranges between 122 - 149 lbs (55 - 67 kg). Which meant I needed to be at least 11 lbs (5 kg) underweight all the time (including during the water retention period before my menstrual cycle).
I remember reading in one of the many fashion magazines I devoured in those days that many HNWI's were putting in their pre-nups that they could divorce their wife without having to settle anything financially if she weighed over 110 lbs (50 kg).
There wasn’t a pre-nup like that for me, but I did restrict what I ate because according to my then-fiancé, Victoria Beckham’s thinness (along with her breast implants) was the epitome of beauty. It was a brutal standard to be compared to and I often felt terrible about how much worse I looked than she. (I also had implants, long since removed. Never, ever again.)
I felt a constant, silent pressure to never weigh a gram over 110 lbs (50 kg). To keep on top of things, I kept a daily food diary to ensure I wasn’t cheating. Looking back at it makes me sad. One day’s entry reads: One mango. Five slices of sashimi. Fourteen cups of green tea.
