BEAUTY

...not a short story 😊 So if you are beautiful, you have an advantage in life. Beautiful people are positively distinguished everywhere. 

They get different advantages just because they are beautiful. I'm not saying that's unfair, but it is.

If somewhere you have to choose between a beautiful and an ugly or average person with the same skills, there's no question that they will choose the one who is prettier. Now let me tell you a little story from yesterday, for example, about the advantages and one's ‘dislike’ of beauty. 

We went to an official place here in Istanbul where there are a lot of people queuing. The security people are very strict about keeping order and making sure that everyone gets in line to see the clerk. We were also queuing when a girl appeared. Long waist-length, freshly ironed brown hair, fashionable dress, slender figure, fancy sunglasses on her head, nicely painted face, big brown eyebrows... She goes up to one of the security men and starts explaining that she just wants to go in for 2 minutes and let her in turn. The first security man wouldn't let her and explained that everyone here was waiting for the same thing she was. But she just wouldn't give up, so she started to make a fuss with the other security man, who let her in and she was almost first in line with one of the male clerks. He looked at her pretty face and took care of her case in about 2 minutes. The rest of us, who had not asked for any benefits and were not particularly pretty, waited. 

We waited our turn, as we always have in life. We didn't fuss, we didn't shout, we were used to not getting any benefits but we didn't want any because we respected the time of others who were also standing there, stressed out like us, worried about getting their cases done and not being sent away to get more paperwork. We have to go to work the same day, they have to do the shopping and clean up and have children waiting for them at home with sick elderly parents. Our lives are the same and time is just as important to us as it is to those who are “beautiful”. But we live our lives and we don't try to stand out because we are not as easily forgiven as those who are ‘nice’.

I once saw a book (too bad I didn't buy it) by Umberto Eco: On Ugliness. 

I am very curious to know what is in it. But everyone knows the story of the ugly duckling I think...almost everyone... well, many people😊 So that story is interesting because everyone can be everything. For example, I've seen women who were so ordinary when they were young, but as they got older they became more beautiful. I don't know how it is, but they've been beautified by time. So the ugly duckling got in with the wrong crowd and didn't fit in, so she was ugly and when she grew up she turned out to be a beautiful swan. That's why she didn't fit in as a child and that's why she wasn't like them and that's why everyone saw her as ugly.

So beauty is said to be subjetive, but there is a universally accepted “beautiful” that without discussing it everyone thinks is beautiful. For example, I've noticed that we tend to think of symmetrical things and, speaking of people, symmetrical faces as beautiful. This symmetry thing has been with us for a long time 😊 since the ‘invention’ of the golden rule of symmetry, which was used by the ancient Egyptians.

In addition, the egg-shaped or elongated face form, the straight nose and nicely curved mouth, the round eyes and nicely curved eyebrows and the slender, rabbit-like, tall stature. These are the European norms in general, because this ideal differs from culture to culture.