What Makes Us Beautiful?

LooksMaxxing, the "feminine artifice", diet culture, and being the most beautiful version of yourself.

When I was around 14, I was in the car with my mother and she pointed to a woman on the sidewalk.

“I wish we were as thin as her,” she said.

The woman in question was white, rail-thin, gaunt, bones jutting out, her hair thinned like it had been falling out.

“Mom,” I said. “She’s sick. She looks like she’s anorexic. Or has cancer or something.”

My mom didn’t say anything. She continued to stare at the woman on the sidewalk, until the light turned green, and her eyes reluctantly returned to the road.

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Starving Away My Soul

From around ages 12-14, I experimented with having an eating disorder.

My mom — about 5’4 and 130 pounds (at most) — had just gotten into Weight Watchers. She encouraged me to try the diet too, giving me the list of foods and their corresponding “points” and suggesting I keep a food diary.

Around the same time, I was walking home from elementary school with my friend and neighbour, a girl (as she still was back then) I’ll call “Willow.”

Willow told me her mother had told her that in elementary school, boys liked the “popular” girls, in high school, they liked the “blonde” girls, but in university they liked the “smart” girls.

I felt awkward. I’m a natural blonde, as was Willow’s younger sister. But Willow had brown hair, cropped short, tomboy-style.

I said something stupid about how I’d maybe find a boyfriend in high school then.

She scoffed, and gave me a dirty look. “Meghan,” she said, “You also have to be thin.”

Around age 12, pics from a family vacation. Apparently too fat to be desirable to teenage boys.

Willow had a maternally-induced eating disorder, i.e. her mother was starving her.

When I slept over at her house, her mother would serve us comically small portions — e.g. one tiny pancake for breakfast (not for financial reasons, her dad had a good job). I’d return home ravenous. She was sent to school with a lunch which consisted of just one mini bagel and cream cheese. She’d look at my normal-sized sandwiches and tell me I was overeating.

I didn’t actually have body dysmorphia. There was a lot I was insecure about (mostly my nose and my blonde eyelashes), but I didn’t think of myself as “fat”. I also didn’t think my mother was fat. And I secretly thought Willow and her sister were too thin and needed to eat more.

But now it occurred to me I was wrong, and maybe I should try to lose weight. After all, I really wanted a boyfriend. I felt unloved as a child, and spent a lot of time alone. I was awkward, weird, anxious, and extremely nerdy — what the kids these days call neurodivergent. I spent hundreds of hours watching Disney movies at my grandparents’ house and had concluded I needed a guy to fall in love with me and save me from my loneliness. And compared to the princesses I related to, I was practically a hippo.

I was such a maladaptive daydreamer and so into taking lucid dreaming naps my college roommates sometimes called me “Sleeping Beauty”. I also spent a lot of time as a kid talking to animals and the statues of animals scattered around my grandparents’ estate. (Don’t judge, the deer statues were pretty cool).

I became particularly self-conscious about my too-short, too-muscular legs and my big fat bubble butt. And maybe my mom was right that I did kind of have a “pot belly”. I was also going through puberty and my boobs were exploding out of my chest. I looked at girls (almost always white, of course) with long, skinny legs and flat butts and chests and envied them.

So I started keeping a food diary, and I tried to starve myself.

I wasn’t very good at it, and didn’t lose weight so much as I didn’t gain any for two years while I grew over two inches and became a C-cup. I weighed myself obsessively. I tracked everything that went into my mouth. I thought about food all day. I can’t remember exactly, but I think I started grade eight at 5’5 and just over 110 pounds.

Diet culture was in full force, and most of the girls and women around me seemed to think my small portion sizes were a good thing, or would even suggest I try cutting out lunch altogether (I’d switched from a full sandwich to a half one). All the time and energy I was putting into not eating had made me worse at sports, dropped my IQ and dinged my grades, and made me kind of boring and less interested in my old hobbies, but I was skinny and therefore I was Good.

I snapped out of it near the end of the year when I overheard a boy in grade ten say to his friend, “There goes the hot grade eight.”

I looked around and I was the only girl there. They were talking about me.

You’d think this would have made me feel good — isn’t that the kind of feedback I was starving myself for? — but instead I wanted to cry.

Because I was really invested in finding a guy who loved me. But I didn’t want to be loved for what I looked like. I wanted to be loved for who I was.

I wanted a guy who liked that I played ringette (basically, a “girls” version of ice hockey of dwindling popularity in Canada), collected comic books (e.g. Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Fox Trot), read science fiction, and was good at math. Who liked my dorky sense of humour and would tolerate going on insanely long walks and exchanging trauma-dumps and nerdy interests. Who didn’t care that I bite my nails (I can’t stop!) and maybe even found my anxiety disorder a bit charming. Who was down to eat a big bowl of pasta and play Monkey Island or watch the South Park movie and other musicals with me.

But I’d stopped being that girl when I stopped eating. I was starving away my personality, as well as my body.

I hated those stupid boys for saying I was hot.

I decided I actually hated all the guys who were responding to my physical appearance. How dare they be interested in me when they didn’t know anything about me? It was an irrational hatred — one I didn’t really recover from until first-year university when a friend told me to stop being such a bitch to men for hitting on me because how on earth were they supposed to get to know who I was if I wouldn’t let them get close?

I threw away my food diary. I stopped counting calories. I started eating again, and gained weight, ballooning to nearly 130 pounds by the end of grade nine (a healthy weight for my build and muscle mass). My mom was horrified — “You used to be so skinny, but then you started to eat again!” — but I didn’t care (or at least I pretended not to care).

I didn’t exactly become an anti-beauty radical — I still appreciated beauty and I wanted to be beautiful. But I wasn’t going to starve myself, or do anything else which made me (really) uncomfortable, to achieve that.

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Beauty Products Are Ruining Our Natural Beauty

When I first went to try to write an essay about my objections to “LooksMaxxing” and “beauty” culture, I initially went the info-dumping route.

Foundation, concealer, and blushes ruin your complexion. Mascara makes your eyelashes fall out. Lipsticks and glosses dry out your lips. Drug store moisturizers dry out your skin. Many popular “skincare” and anti-aging products found in drug stores actually seem to lead to slightly worse aging. Many shampoos and conditioners yield great short-term results but also destroy your hair. Underwire bras make breasts look great when you wear them, but also cause the muscles that hold up your boobs to wither away so your tits are saggier without a bra.

Many of these products contain heavy metals, parabens, forever chemicals, synthetic dyes, hormone disruptors, carcinogens, and other toxins. All are addictive. I know because I’ve tried a lot of them.

Quitting required a detox period where I was considerably less attractive before my boobs bounced back (took about two years), my hair got used to the all-natural shampoo bars (now my hair doesn’t really get greasy, but I looked horrible for weeks), my skin stopped craving moisturizer, my eyelashes grew back (etc).

What makes us look “good” in the short-term too often destroys our beauty (and health) in the long-term.

18-years-old and wearing way too much make-up. I washed it off after taking some photos because I hated how I looked and felt. The same thing happened when my mom took me to get professional make-up applied for my high school graduation, I didn’t look like me and it bothered my skin so I washed it off (sorry, Mom).

Also age 18 at my LooksSlackiest. I actually prefer how I look in this photo compared to the last one but I think we can all agree I should have tried a lil harder and yes, obviously I am hammered here. (Actually, a fairly decent looking guy was all over me on that night, so the tee-shirt was not actually that big a liability).

But I already went over this with my insane attempt to try to convince women to stop bleaching and dying their hair with harsh chemicals. Most people realize this stuff is toxic, just as we all kind of know Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs are terrible for your health, and Botox is literally injecting poison into your face. (I don’t even want to know what lip filler is).

While I suspect that LooksMaxxing and what Kryptogal (Kate, if you like) cleverly called the “feminine artifice” has increasingly become more about looking good on camera than attracting / keeping a partner (e.g. Botox use spiked alongside the rise in Zoom), there’s no denying women are bombarded with the message that we need to optimize our beauty with nice clothes, make-up, skincare routines, surgeries, and other alterations in order to win the heart of a handsome man with at least a six-figure-per-year job.

It doesn’t matter what you’re insecure about, there’s someone out there trying to sell you something unhealthy to “fix” it. (If you google “aquiline nose”, the type of nose I have, the first page of results link you to plastic surgeons).

I was triggered a few days ago during an interaction with another female Substack writer talking about how eating a high healthy fat diet doesn’t make you fat, and she posted a picture of her body (face blotted out) as an example, but clarified several times that she “wasn’t a model” and would like to lose a few pounds. I’m not going to share her photo, but she has an insanely hot body. She’s a bit thinner than me!

It reminded me a bit of my mom wishing she had the body of a woman who looked like she was about to drop dead from starvation even though my mom was healthy and attractive and married to my dad who resembles a famously hot Hollywood actor and had an impressive six-figure salary at the time.

Just today, while I was writing this, Cartoons Hate Her dropped a funny and relatable essay calling herself a “mid” in part because she has too-short legs and I’m guessing a similar nose to mine — ouch! The thing is, I doubt she’s “mid”. She’s probably gorgeous (her husband later confirmed in the Subscriber Chat that she is indeed a total hottie).

And the thing is, in my original essay, I was about to be guilty of this too — I had a joke in the original draft about how I was a “sloppy 7/8”.

Nearly 38, make-up free, Botox-free, filler-free, bra-free (etc). After having two kids and desperately in need of more sleep. Definitely not as thin as CHH and the other "not-a-model" hottie.

The original essay was about how I’ve started to notice my skin is aging better than most women around my age — and many several years younger. I think one reason is that I always found skin make-up, conventional sunscreens, moisturizers, and most “skincare” products so icky, I rarely used them.

From my original draft:

“I’m not judging anyone for wearing make-up or getting Botox or lip filler or nose jobs or whatever — I like smoking, and have made tons of other unhealthy decisions. But it seems like women are bombarded with the message that they “need” to do all this shit to be attractive to men, and I honestly do not think this is true.

Men point out all the time that they prefer women who wear little to no make-up, and are often met with responses from women that a) they don’t care, they wear make-up for themselves, not for dudes, and it’s a form of “self-care”, or b) actually, men are just kind of stupid and don’t realize the “make-up-free” women they are drooling over are actually wearing make-up.

Comic from this essay by Cartoons Hate Her.

Cartoons Hate Her includes some make-up-free pictures of celebrities with not-so-great-skin to demonstrate her point, and she’s right that women who wear make-up every day tend to look kind of bad without it — but this is because the make-up is destroying their complexions.

Women who rarely or never wear make-up usually look just fine without it — I am not the only woman I know who has had zero issue attracting male suitors with my make-up-free face (a sexy bright-coloured dress is definitely helpful though).

What “no make-up” looked like when I was 32.

Anyway, I’m not writing this article to brag about my sloppy 7 face. I’m diving into this fraught topic because a lot of young women seem to be aging really poorly because of all this propaganda, as well as increasing their risks for fertility issues, various cancers, and other health — and mental health — problems.

On the flip side, women who rarely wear make-up and aren’t all that into skincare etc seem to be aging much better (as are healthy men! Don’t believe me? Just look at the skin on a healthy dude in his forties or even fifties!).”

I know this is controversial, but I really do believe (most) men are telling us the truth when they say they prefer women with little to no make-up and “natural” beauty. I know several women who rarely or never wear make-up and no alterations (that I’m aware of) who bagged devoted male partners firmly in the 9+ range in terms of physical appearance and personality — and all have good jobs too. Two of the guys are well over six feet and have jacked bodies!

And when I think back on it, most of the girls I knew who were really popular with the boys in high school and university were mostly make-up free and also wore fairly comfortable clothing (that they looked great in). And the made-up popular girls were popular because they were fun, kind, smart, and hilarious, (and, yes, had healthy, sexy bodies and symmetrical facial features) — I don’t think I ever heard the guys who liked them mention they were really into how they applied their foundation and I’m willing to bet every single one of their boyfriends loved how they looked the minute they stepped out of the shower.

On social media, I’ve seen many women share goofy or unattractive photos of themselves they found on their boyfriend or husband’s phone (often set as a background photo).

I love this so much and you know Mikala’s husband absolutely adores her.

Guys love these photos of their women because they show off her personality.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a guy tell me he wished I wore more make-up (while many guys have told me my make-up free look is one of the reasons they like me), or that my legs are too short, or I should dress better, or even that my nose is too big. And I’ve only rarely been told by men I’d look better if I lost weight — and one of those guys was a personal trainer hitting on me at the bar by offering me free training to “lose five pounds”.

And you know, I’ve also never heard a guy say, “Oh, I was really into her but then she wore make-up and a push-up bra to a party and now not so much.”

Almost all the negative comments I’ve heard about my appearance have come from other women. The pressure to go on diets, to buy expensive skincare products, to wear make-up, to buy designer clothes, to get Botox or lip filler or a nose job or whatever … it’s all mostly from other women.

Ladies, what are we doing to ourselves — to each other?

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Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Here’s the thing — the whole “ranking” of people in terms of looks is actually a load of crap. Hotness is actually very subjective. I’ve swooned all over guys my friends have thought were pretty meh and vice versa.

One guy’s “mid” is another guy’s “9” — I was told I was only a “6” by one guy in high school whereas once a random dude who grabbed me on the street told me I was “perfect”, which I’ll interpret to mean that scary weirdo thought I was firmly in “9/10” range. And while people into skinny girls probably do think my ass is too big and thus will ding me for it, I’ll have you know I was once voted “second-best ass in grade ten” by a group of boys, losing out to another blonde with a slightly larger posterior.

It’s also extremely silly to rank someone’s attractiveness by their photos. Nearly everyone is capable of looking bad in a picture (except maybe Luigi Mangione and Tyra Banks?), and literally everyone is capable of dolling themselves up and using lighting and angles strategically to make themselves look a lot hotter. I once had a driver’s license with such an unflattering photo, a bouncer accused me of using a fake ID because — and I quote — I was “too hot to be the girl in that photo.”

Back in one of my first essays on Substack, I talked a bit about the double-slit experiment which showed how light acts like a wave until recorded, upon which it collapses into a particle. Out in the real world, we interact with each other as waves.

But photos, videos etc of us online are just particles. You can get an idea of what someone might be like in person if you collect enough particles, but you kind of need to hang out with them in person to get to know the wave.

When we like a person for who they are — their personality, their humour, their intelligence, their energy, their wave — we start to find them more physically attractive too. What pretty much all of the successfully couples I’ve met who the terminally online might view as not particularly “LooksMatched” had in common was they liked each other for a heck of a lot more than physical appearance.

I think if you spend too much time interacting with other human beings as particles, it’s natural to become a bit more particle-like yourself — and to start obsessing over particles and forgetting about, or misunderstanding the importance of, the waves.

I’ve noticed some people — often the perpetually single and terminally online of both sexes — are convinced both men and women will choose to date the best looking of their options, and that hot men and beautiful women can have “anyone they choose.”

I have not found this to be true.

If anything, the best catches of both sexes (and some of the best looking of both sexes) are significantly less shallow about physical appearance than the involuntary celibate. They will pick the best person to date out of their options, that is, the person they best click with, who has the best personality fit, who makes them laugh, who warms their heart and takes care of them, who is reasonably attractive and a good intellectual fit.

Pictured: two people who love each other and are growing old together.

The only people who are obsessed with dating the hottest person possible are people who are trying to validate their own attractiveness through another person. And nobody worth dating wants to date someone who is trying to use them in that way.

“Tracey, I’m in love with you, no matter what you weigh!”

What I’ve found to be more true is that psychologically healthy people tend to be attracted to other psychologically healthy people, whereas psychologically damaged people tend to attract other damaged people. Normie attracts normie, crazy attracts crazy, weird attracts weird, sloppy attracts sloppy etc.

See? I told you! Regardless of what CHH and her husband look like, it seems safe to say they are a MentalHealthMatch.

I’ve had very hot men with messy backstories and fairly serious mental health and substance issues fall all over me, while extremely “mid” or even unattractive emotionally stable men from healthy families will typically only see red flags and are legit super not into it.

Whether you find me attractive or not depends a lot on whether you’re into tragic blondes who are mildly retarded and helpless but also weirdly brilliant in super-specific ways with a bit of a princess vibe and a touch of Bipolar II (i.e. are you the kind of guy who thinks, “I can save her”?)

That time I went as “Courtney Love” for Halloween 2006.

Regarding make-up and dressing nicely and the whole “feminine artifice” thing — there are lots of guys out there who are into that if you’re doing it because it’s something you genuinely enjoy — if it’s an authentic part of who you are.

Fashion and make-up and hairstyling etc are art forms, and it’s cool when people are into them (just, you know, try to use the healthiest and least toxic products available!!). Some women are crazy into and talented at putting together interesting and colourful outfits — whether they are buying designer stuff or are an ingenious thrifter or make their own clothes (just avoid polyester and other synthetic fabrics!).

It’s part of who they are, and that’s attractive.

I actually have zero interest in that stuff, which is why it doesn’t work for me. The only reason I ever put make-up on (besides Halloween costumes) or shopped for a sexy dress was because I was trying to attract male attention. That’s considerably less cool than doing it because I actually enjoy it and guys pick up on that. In the same way, I actually enjoy exercise and a lot of sports and nerdy crap like math and science fiction and listening to guys ramble about Greco-Roman or WWII history, which is why some guys find this attractive in me — I’m doing it because I actually like it.

I’m not telling women who enjoy the art of make-up etc to not do it (but read the labels and research the ingredients!!). I’m just letting other girls and women who aren’t into it know they don’t have to do it to attract a guy who is great for them.

The best way to attract someone who is a good fit is through accurate advertising.

I met my husband on OKCupid during the 2020 lockdowns. 100% of my photos were make-up free — my inbox was hopping and I got an email letting me know I was one of the most popular people on the site in my area. Here’s an example (from 2018).

I was harsh on my mom at the beginning of this essay, so I’ll share another story she told me once. In her early twenties, dressed up for a wedding, she walked past a field where some guys were playing football and the ball landed at her feet.

My mom is an insanely talented athlete and loves sports. So she casually picked up the ball and expertly fired it across the field into one of the guy’s hands.

And she told me they were so impressed, some of those guys were looking at her like she was a literal goddess.

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Still, I Should Probably Try Harder To Stay Healthy / Beautiful

I lucked out in 2020 and met my wonderful husband — who I really do believe loves me for me. He first developed a crush on me after reading one of my essays (he likes my brain, you guys!!), and was stoked to find me on OKCupid (we were a 99% match!) a couple months later. And I was one of the only women who fell for him without first hearing him play guitar and sing.

If you’ve read a lot of my past work, you’re probably aware we were both hot messes when we met. And we fixed each other up (works in progress).

Robert Lopez (Avenue Q, Book of Mormon) and his wife really nailed it with these lyrics for Disney’s Frozen — a love song about how people with “peculiar” brains can fix each other up with a “little bit of love.” Lyrics in video.

But you know what? My husband also likes how I look. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I like how he looks too.

(You know those high school pics I shared above? My husband thought I looked cuter with the baggy tee-shirt and light mascara — and I actually finally ditched the mascara altogether because of him. The last time I wore it was our wedding day, and he admitted afterwards he found me more beautiful without it. And he likes my nose! It shows off my Italian-ness!).

Shortly after I birthed our first daughter, I made a joke about cutting my hair into a short “Mom cut”. He freaked out and begged me not to do it.

And I guess I’ve realized that while I don’t need to be insecure about ending up with a guy who only likes me for my looks anymore, I also have a really good reason to try to stay healthy and beautiful.

Not for the camera. Not for other women. Not for random men. For him.

Because he’ll love me no matter what, and while I’d also love him no matter what he looks like, he’s still trying to stay attractive and healthy (partially) for me.

So, you know, I should probably try to take better care of my hair (it looks way better when I trim it regularly and repair damage with black seed oil). And stop the self-destructive BS (guys, the thing is organic tobacco actually tastes and smells good and it calms my anxiety but obviously is still terrible and a beauty-destroyer). And maybe start doing crunches or something, IDK.

But mostly I’ll just continue to try to eat healthy foods, avoid unhealthy ones, and get lots of exercise — I just want to be the healthiest and most beautiful version of myself.

And that’s the sort of beauty I’ll encourage my daughters to pursue; not starvation, not alterations, not masks or facades they don’t feel comfortable in — but the unique and healthiest and most beautiful versions of themselves.

Photo by my husband, Mexico, January 14, 2026.

I’ll give at least 24 hours for quick-acting readers to drop a comment for free but then I will probably paywall the comments just to force dudes who want to call me “mid” and women who want to get mad at me for not using moisturizer or daily sunscreen or make fun of me for smoking organic tobacco to pay me at least $5 USD or a re-stack to do so.

Edit: Comments are still open, and will be as long as everyone continues to be cool and thoughtful in them.

I have gotten into the natural “beauty” thing of late as an extension of my interest in crunchy health, so now I occasionally use natural oils (rose hip oil > retinol! castor oil > Botox!) and stuff like the Tallowed Truth’s beef tallow with frankincense and raw honey as anti-aging, skincare, and hair treatments.

Mostly, I just try to eat my skin and haircare though (e.g. Moringa leaf powder, Shilajit, raw milk, lots of eggs, homemade chicken bone broth etc — all support healthy weight loss too!).

Tagging Mikala Jamison because I used her note and photos in this essay but couldn’t tag her in the image caption.