When I say the word beauty, a few things may come to mind. Perhaps the beauty section of a store, or a model. Perhaps you think of “iPhone face.” A somewhat new Tiktok term, the phrase is roughly defined by having the kind of face that looks beautiful in photos taken largely by the selfie camera of an iPhone. Essentially, it’s the kind of beauty standard popularized by social media.
In the way we understand beauty in our current society, beauty is perfect. An iPhone face is one I can imagine is angular, the perfect heart shaped face with upturned eyes and an upturned nose, much of which can be achieved if one purchases filler treatments. In many ways, especially looking at the example of the iPhone face, the current definition of beauty is one specifically in which everything fits neatly into boxes. “This is categorically beautiful,” we say.
Have you ever eaten a fresh papaya? When I was in Quepos, Costa Rica, for a month, staying in a hostel in the jungle, I think I had some of my first experiences with fresh papaya. In Costa Rica, fruits like papaya and pineapple grow abundantly. You can find mangos on the side of the road and nothing quite tastes like a side-of-the-road mango. I bought a papaya off the back of a truck one day in Quepos for roughly $1 US. A Russian woman who was living in New York was with me and she excitedly commented on how a papaya is $8 in New York. We took our papayas back to the hostel.
I stayed at this hostel in Quepos, Costa Rica for a few weeks in 2021. The time I was there spanned Christmas and New Year’s Eve, without me really noticing that was how I had booked it. I was the only consistent guest at the time, and became a pseudo-host to people who came to the hostel for just a few days, showing them Quepos’ one main road and the beaches of neighboring Manuel Antonio. This woman was one of the many people I showed the ropes of the town that largely had one main street.
The hostel was made of private rooms all sharing a kitchen and common space. The kitchen had no walls. It was a corrugated roof covering a space of an oven, two refrigerators, a sink, shelves of pots and pans, a kitchen table, several hammocks, and a small couch made of shipping pallets and a mat. To say I spent most of my time there would be an understatement. I had come not to pass through the town and see the things you’re supposed to see while in Quepos, Costa Rica, but to be. Ahead of me while I laid in the hammock, was the beautiful mountain of no particular fame, which I admired on many days during that time.
It was beautiful. There was nothing around for miles so given I had no car, I spent most of that part of my trip quite literally in the hostel. I had nowhere to be. And I didn’t mind it—in fact, if you cannot tell, I am relishing recalling these memories as I share them with you. I spent many a morning, afternoon, and night in that open kitchen, either alone, or with people from the hostel, with the mountain of no particular fame in the background.
On many days, the beautiful pitter patter of rain on the corrugated roof accompanied me. I shared New Year’s Eve on those hammocks with two strangers from Ibiza that for that night were my friends. A Costa Rican doctor sat in the other hammock and for a moment the four of us were united in time and space, recalling the events leading up to this moment, and enjoying a New Year’s Eve in Costa Rican countryside during Covid with nothing to do, nothing to see—special though for no particular reason.
It was perfect to me. Not because it was especially spectacular or noteworthy, but because it was real, honest, and paradoxically, imperfect. Costa Rica was not my favorite country. I found the parts considered desirable to be overly manicured, manufactured, and expensive. But in this hostel’s common kitchen, I found beauty and I look back on that time extremely fondly. In the mornings, I could gaze out of the window of my tiny room and only try to count all the variety of plant life that would seemingly salute me each day. It was a wonderful time in my life.
Beauty is perfect while perfect is not necessarily beautiful.
Since few Americans may have had the experience of eating a papaya off of a truck in Costa Rica, let me share that with you. Not everyone likes papaya, but I do. For one, it is still a bit novel to me, but besides that the taste is one I enjoy. The taste will vary based on a lot of factors, but one has to do with how ripe it is, and even the particular part of papaya you are experiencing in the middle could be sweeter than the pieces on the end. The deepest part of the papaya will likely be the most deeply orange, while the tips could be a lighter color. It is sweet when it is truly ripe, which I enjoy. But it’s also tangy, with a slight taste of foot to it that some people don’t like. For me, all together, it’s an experience. I have some papaya in my morning smoothie most days.
I like papayas, and not because they taste like cake. I like them not because they cost $8 in New York. I like papayas because I like papayas. I see papayas for what they are supposed to be. I find papayas beautiful.
In the kitchen one night, I could hear the Russian woman from New York talking from her room, which shared a wall with the cooking space. I guess she didn’t know she could be heard so clearly from there. She had arrived and spent most of her time working in her room though the common space with the mountain was right outside. Her American creative agency gave her little time off despite the fact that it was Christmas. She spent the little time she had outside of the hostel comparing things to New York and eating them if they were significantly cheaper than their versions in New York. She was a professional photo editor, editing photos for clients as big as Tiffany’s—her job was to make things look perfect.
“It’s a shit hole,” she said, loudly describing how she saw the hostel on the phone.
Beauty is quite personal. But I think we need to separate its definition from “perfect.” Beauty is only perfect because anything beautiful will feel complete and whole exactly as it is . Wholeness is generally the result of accepting things as they are—the real and the raw included. In the pursuit of perfection—which means 100 percent, 100 percent of the time—we often don’t realize wholeness is achieved not just with less than 100 percent, but that wholeness is beautiful in its unexpectedness that gives the world meaning. Wouldn’t the world be boring and devoid if everything were perfect, like one big Target?
My god daughter was born with a large birthmark on her forehead. Born with it, we assumed it would fade until it settled there. It has grown with and on her. She is a bright, sweet 10-year-old. She is beautiful for a lot of reasons—her brown skin, blue eyes, and quiet yet energetic demeanor—but also for the birthmark. It is a part of who she is, and she is beautiful because she is her.
Rarely in our society do we understand that it is in imperfection that beauty most lives, like the piece of paper scribbled on by your child left on the kitchen counter this morning that makes you smile, or the way your mom’s teeth are crooked in that way that is so special and unique to her.
Perfect is not necessarily beautiful. Brutalist architecture emerged as a trending style after WWII for a multitude of reasons. It is filled with a lot of the straight lines found in the kind of interiors people love on Pinterest—it is filled with straight lines that we equate with that which is perfect. From a standpoint of what buildings should do, the buildings met their purpose while adhering to the strict standards for the buildings that made them achieve that 100 percent target of perfection. And yet brutalism fell from fancy because the buildings in their architectural perfection were cold, ugly, and unpleasant. In a way, people hated brutalism because it was so perfect it was devoid of beauty, of the quirks that made architecture a worthwhile endeavor.
The complete absence of beauty gave people such a visceral response that it proved that beauty is not in perfection. But it also proves another point, which is that we need beauty in our societies because it is beautiful. Beauty makes our lives beautiful.
In this capitalist society, we like to isolate the parts of everything into what can be used and sold—we only care for things as much as they serve us and often struggle to see the inherent value of things existing just to exist. It is in this way we appreciate papayas because they are $8 in New York. But in reducing beauty down to its most perfect, utilitarian parts, we miss the point. Beautiful things are beautiful to be beautiful, like a large first bite of a papaya should make you feel like you are having your first bite of fresh papaya—a delicious human experience that I pray you have one day. I hope that papaya makes you remember that you are alive.
Beautiful things are made to perhaps make us smile, think, slow down, feel relaxed, or just feel happiness or joy. Like a calm mountain of no particular fame that can be seen from a couch made of shipping pallets, or a birthmark on the forehead of someone you love. Beauty makes us happy. That’s it. Beauty’s point is simply to be beautiful and make our existences more worthwhile. The happiness we feel when we witness beauty may improve our lives, and that’s valuable. But we cannot commoditize beauty. It loses its power in our lives.
“I feel myself as an artist. I like to do things because they’re beautiful,” Brazilian jiu jitsu legend Rickson Gracie said in the 1999 documentary about him called “Choke.”1
Anything that is honest, real, raw—can be beautiful, can be whole. It is in this way we say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is in this way we can all be artists, creating beauty all around us. It is in this way we contribute to society. We contribute to society by being honest, real, and raw. We contribute when we are the most whole versions of ourselves. Because in our sheer, whole existence, we are beautiful and exude beauty. And that is a worthwhile pursuit.
- Choke, directed by Robert Raphael Goodman (1999; Los Angeles, CA: Manga Video) DVD.
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