Sense of Booty

Beauty, Bootea and all the rest of it

This essay serves as part of the STSC Symposium for May: Beauty. A monthly collaboration from STSC's writers around a set theme.

Beauty they say, is in the eye of the beholder. If you want to check if that’s true, just ask a mellitologists’ optician.

Now that was a cheap start, i’ll admit. But to some that joke may be beautiful. Because beauty is so incredibly subjective. Finding common threads between variations of beauty is hard. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure (to continue this dull cliche usage) or one man’s multi-million-dollar painting titled ‘number 5’ is another man’s ‘fuck sake the kids have spilt the paint all over the shed’.

But if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then boo-tea is in the hands of the desperate influencer. Bootea is essentially modern day snake oil. ‘Lose weight by drinking tea’ only works if all you are doing is drinking tea. Yet we find Instagram's MVPs (that’s Most Vapid Pricks) holding boxes of 'magical teas' that offer as much wizardry as Jack's beans did¹. Women with plastic arses from Instanbul or logging 40 hour work weeks in the gym telling you that the way to look like them is to drink some tea in an all too fancy box. If god delivered miracles to your door I’m not sure he’d choose a ‘cute pastel aesthetic’ to do it. They’re selling beauty, but that’s not what you’re buying.

Really though it is subjective, which also means it can be prone to bullshit. People who are famous in a field can get away with shite by calling it genius, all under the guise of ‘subjectivity’. Then people confirm this because they want to signal something. We’ve seen this where ‘luxury brands’ sell destroyed jeans²or paint smattered shoes for tear inducing prices. Rich people LARPing as poor in the name of ‘fashion’. This isn’t beauty, not even to them. This is social signalling warfare, perception and opinion ruling all. In the same way baggy ripped clothes is fashion when you are wealthy and good looking, and tragic when poor, or ugly. It won’t be long before Gucci releases a new line of branded Payday loans.

For me, beauty comes down to intention. Anything can be beautiful, but it must have a level of intention to it. Similar to online content which serves an alternative purpose (to sell you something, either immediately or down the line), things made for any reason other than to be made, cannot be beautiful. Brewing and drinking a coffee can be beautiful, if it’s done intentionally. Changing your baby can be beautiful (remember I did say it was subjective, i’ll concede that objectively - shit is not beautiful). Walks often are beautiful, or they were before we broke their serene glass by throwing an AirPod-and-shit-podcast shaped rock through it. When we multi-task, when we break from just doing a thing and ‘stick something in the background’, we lose the beauty. And this isn’t about distraction - productivity is not beautiful either. Nobody ever sat and stared at their note taking system, or Eisenhower Matrix and thought ‘wow’³.

We are told what beauty is all the time. But being told something is beautiful, almost rules it out. Real beauty is found, is created and is noticed - intentionally. You can’t glance at a building and notice the detail in the brickwork or the small things that make it so. You can’t fly through life trying to grind, be productive and also live beautifully. The on-the-go in-between meetings, cup of instant coffee isn’t beautiful. Slowly brewing, enjoying and noticing the surroundings with a coffee is. Beauty is less about the thing and more about the experience. A fragrance might be lovely but if it’s rammed under your nose by a pushy salesman, it loses its sheen. It’s not about the smell of the thing, but how you smell it.

The phrase ‘stop and smell the roses’ isn’t about roses at all, it’s about stop.

1. I’m aware Jack’s beans did in the end become magical and make that big beanstalk into the clouds. But you get the point.

2. And not ‘ripped jeans’ as in, a small hole where your grandad can joke about you falling over in them, I mean your local painter decorators ruined Levis level of destruction.

3. Unless they thought ‘wow’ what a waste of time, I could’ve just done the thing instead of creating weird systems to tell me how and when to do the thing