The Beauty Issue
Jess Blanch- RUSSH Magazine
What is it with this fascination we have with beauty? As
civilisation progresses, our intoxication of its allure only grows.
Poets have explored it for centuries, science stays fixated on how to
get it and yet philosophies remain divided across the ages. What is
beauty? What is its truth? It was this very wonderment that led us to
this issue. Beyond the ‘beauties’ themselves (Jourdan Dunn, that is you,
mind-blowingly bold and so beautiful), we loved the idea of exploring
what we believe to be at its heart. The daily rituals – to eat, sleep
and bathe – the subtleties in the way we do them that makes each of us
different. The acceptance that creams, nor clothes will ever really
‘make’ us beautiful, but can certainly change how we feel. It became
about uncovering hidden intimacies, exploring eroticism, nourishment and
fulfillment and revelling in the gorgeousness of the everyday that
doesn’t need to be shown-off.
We could not avoid those questions, however, of that which
can ruin our pleasure. The ever-growing self-surveillance cameras that
too often dictate our lives, the hyper-gaze and our obsession with
creating an image for ourselves to be documented, and then endorsed by
others, across cyberspace and the inexhaustible feed of Instagram and
Facebook. How this endless pursuit of the virtue that’s associated with
exquisiteness has led to us creating and controlling our image rather
than just living it. The result of which is sometimes, just simply, a
feeling of inadequacy. Can’t we just be in the moment? Isn’t our own
memory the most potent camera of all?
It was Warhol who said, “I usually accept people on the
basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do
with the way they think than their objective-images do.” There is some
comfort in these words. Wouldn’t it be cool if things were as we thought
them, if we were, in fact, as we thought ourselves to be? I like to
believe that we only care about how we look on the outside in the hope
that others will be interested about what lies within: that we all know
deep down that beauty exists in the mind, that it is of the soul and it
can only come from goodness.
It’s funny then that I’m the one wearing the tinted lens.
Perhaps I do need to take them off. Maybe it is only when we accept
reality, for what it is, for what we are, that we will know beauty for
what it truly means. Maybe it’s time to try this life ‘no filter’.
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