“Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.” I absolutely adore Oscar Wilde as he goes off on his poetic tangents to describe his views on everyday things such as beauty.
If we are to say that beauty and genius are somehow comparable, I wonder if we, if at all, can be manufacturing these things. The sense that beauty can be "produced" is something a lot of cosmetic products(sellers) give us. Getting bald, having a wrinkled face, saggy skin, drooping breasts are the natural tide of things. I am reminded of an astonishingly talented Joint Secretary of Nepal Buddhi Sagar Lamichhane (who also was in the investigation commission of the Yeti Airlines Flight 691 crash) tell me, "If you're on a plane and you don't experience turbulence at all, that's when you've got to be nervous."
I believe it was George Orwell who said that a person gets the face they deserve when they are forty. In a quiet way, I am waiting for his pronouncement to hit me, just so that I can look at what would it be like to have a face a decade from now. Will I finally be tempted to put on sunscreens and what not to look younger, perhaps a tad "brighter". I don't know.
On the quest to become "whiter", Michael Jackson did things with his face (and more) that might have shuddered a lot of his fanbase. (As I write this, I am pondering over whether he stretched this procedure to the one organ that I thought was perenially black. Hint: it's not the eye).
What do we call this state of mind of Jackson? "Body Dysmorphic Disorder" This is something that I got to know with Dr. Isha Poudel Koirala- a brilliant dermatologist of our time. She dispelled a few of the other myths perpetrated in our time such as "drinking a lot of water gets the skin going" or that "cosmetics are, in general, chemicals and therefore, bad". She was quite open about the environmental concerns from cosmetic packaging too.
When Oscar Wilde wrote those aforementioned words, he was playing with the idea of "an immortal, youthful beauty". The wish of Dorian to be an emblem of just that came true- his painting would age instead of him. And the horrors of the thing sought-after coming true mimicks Jeffery Eugenides' pronouncement "Beauty is always freakish".
I'd say neither of the extremes of beauty being either "genius" or "freakish" is true- the truth as are most of the times "neither here nor there". I sometimes think Shakespeare had it best (as is most of the time) when he said that nothing was good and bad intrinsically but "thinking" made it so. I'd say the same is true of cosmetics.
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The two men who are at the forefront of WiseDumb podcasts are Karan Bhatta and Rupesh Sah who are researchers, educators and media personalities. You can reach out to them for a collaboration:
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