Lipstick on a pig

I saw a beautiful girl today and it made me think of all the beautiful girls I’ve ever seen

Beauty. Such a strange, delicate, weaponized thing. The word itself is soft, fragile. It lingers like perfume after someone leaves, intangible, unforgettable. A word that somehow feels ancient and futuristic all at once, like it was born to name the stars but now labels our faces. “Pretty,” “cute,” “fine”, they orbit the real word like satellites but none of them touch the weight of beautiful.

When I was a child, I didn’t know what beauty was. I just recognized it. It was my mother with red lipstick and short hair. It was my rabbit’s soft fur and tiny paws. It was in guava seeds, in dewy leaves, in the exact silence before the sky breaks into rain.

However, I had never looked into the mirror and asked: Am I beautiful? Unfortunately, it eventually came.

Years later, after the innocence had worn off, I found myself on TikTok and stumbled on a video asking: “Are you cat, fox, bunny or deer pretty?”
Apparently, beauty wasn’t enough anymore. They needed subcategories. Archetypes. Boxes.
I was neither. I didn't fit.

And the moment I realized what "pretty privilege" was? I was seven.
Recess. The game was Boys Catch Girls. I ran, laughing, checking behind my back but no one followed. They didn’t care to catch me. The boys were after the pretty ones, the ones you bragged about catching. I stopped running and sat on the pavement. That was the only time I got caught, not because anyone wanted to.

Beauty, for many, has become a holy word, a relic we chase like salvation.
Sometimes, it looks like this: You spend hours watching makeup tutorials. You line your lips, draw out your eyes, trace your brows. You fight with glue for lashes that never sit quite right. You add concealer under your eyes and contour under your cheekbones, hoping to erase tiredness and redraw a face that the world might recognize as "worthy."

You finally open your front camera.
You've prepared. You've saved sounds. You’re ready. You just need one good shot.

Filter on. Lighting changed. Head tilted to hide your double chin. Try one: no.
Try two: delete. Try three: awkward. Four: your nose looks crooked. Five: your lips aren’t full enough.
You reapply lip gloss. Change angles again.
Six. Seven. Eight.

The videos pile up in your drafts like little corpses. They’re not dead, but they feel wrong. Not good enough to be seen.
You try again. You’re sweating now.
Try sixteen. Try twenty.

And then it hits you—the sinking, acidic disappointment. You’ve given hours to a screen and the screen still says no.

You think: “People will notice they’ll see I tried. They’ll know this is just... lipstick on a pig.” And that oddly feels so embarassing, while others are naturally pretty, you have to try.

You feel naive . You delete everything. You close the app.
You look in the mirror and feel sick. Not because of how you look but because of how much you struggled to look different.
You go to bed without washing your face.
You feel shame.
The silent kind. The kind you carry like a wet coat on your back. You fall asleep with your face still on.
Still not enough.

We live in a world that rewards beauty but only a specific kind of it. A rehearsed, unreachable, airbrushed version. The type you must perform to be allowed to exist.

And yet… even the beautiful girls I know don’t feel beautiful.
They were told by ten industries, twenty boyfriends and a thousand algorithms that they weren’t enough. So they believe it. They look into mirrors and don’t see themselves, only corrections waiting to happen.

But what is a beautiful woman?
What is an ugly one?

Is it the nose? The chin? The spaces between the teeth? The skin? The folds, the scars, the pores?
Tell me.
Point at your own face in a mirror and explain to me—without using someone else's face as a reference—why your features are wrong.
You can't.

You weren’t born with this hatred.
It was planted.

In fairy tales, beauty is the currency.
Princesses are loved because they’re beautiful. Lovely eyes, soft features and just the right curves. Witches are hated because they are not. Big noses, moles on their cheek.
In movies, the weird girl is transformed with a haircut and a dress—then she gets the guy, then she becomes happy. They show that she was never really interested in the books, the philosophy, the fun games. Apparently, all she needed was a makeover.
And poets, they write endlessly about women who were beautiful, as if beauty is the only thing worth remembering about their love.

And the girls who aren't called beautiful? They disappear. Even if they’re brilliant. Even if they’re funny. Even if they are flames in human form.
We tell girls: it’s better to be pretty than powerful. That a symmetrical face will open more doors than a sharp mind ever could.

That’s the real tragedy.

We try to participate in a system designed to spit us out. They want to sell us more of their shit and for that they sell us insecurities. We edit ourselves into versions we barely recognize and even then, it’s not enough.

Do you understand how painful that is? How humiliating it is to try to feel beautiful and still end up feeling ugly?

Yes, ugly. The word they use to slice through confidence like a knife. The word they whisper and hurl, sometimes in our direction, sometimes in our own heads. The word that has been weaponized so brutally we’d rather stay invisible than risk being called it.

I’ve watched women claw their way through trends hoping for a scrap of approval. I’ve seen beautiful girls break down because they don’t look beautiful enough. Even the ones who “make it” are still drowning in the fear of losing it.

Society really doesn’t care how kind you are. Or how brilliant, how brave, how loyal your are. If your nose is too wide or your acne is too visible or your teeth aren’t symmetrical, you get shoved to the sidelines.

Even worse, some of us are made to believe we chose this. That if we just worked harder, we could be beautiful too. As if beauty were a meritocracy as if anyone chooses to be invisible.

To this violence, I respond: you are beautiful. Except, you were never supposed to be reduced to that. You are beautiful and thats the least intresting thing about you.

I am done. Done watching girls scrub their skin raw, chasing clarity and worth. Done seeing brilliance bend itself into filters, angles and quiet. Done with beauty as a battlefield we never asked to fight on.

You are not an aesthetic. You are not a category. You are not a mirror’s opinion.

You were not born to be looked at.
You were born to look back.
To speak. To burn. To be.

And they will call you ugly for it. Let them. Let it echo. Let it sting. Never let it stop you.

You are not a project.
You are not a product.

You are the whole damn revolution.