'The scars on my face made a little girl run crying to her mum.'

"The only reason women aren’t running the world by now," a male colleague said recently, ‘is because they’re still in the bathroom getting ready."

It was a joke, of course, and my good-natured colleague is fluent in them, but I must admit to laughing a little less enthusiastically than the other women in the room. Because in that moment I’d felt seen – and seen is a thing I work very hard to either avoid or control. It takes up a lot of my time, too much of it, mostly spent in bathrooms.

You don’t have to be vain to fixate on your physical appearance – and you don’t have to be a woman. For some of us, the motivation is to stand out less rather than more, to cover up things that might compromise conversation, to stop people staring for the wrong reasons. To make it easier to simply show up.

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In my case, there are two quite large and significant skin cancer scars on my face that I choose to cover. Without an elaborate daily makeup routine honed over several years at my bathroom sink, they would dominate my face. They would define the way people see me and, by extension, the way I see myself. And that would make this thing called life much harder than it needs to be.

You’re thinking I can’t be objective about this, and you’re right. I’ve been doing it for too long now to know how a stranger might react to my uncovered face. But I do remember the first time – when my newly scarred face made a little girl in a library explode into tears and run to her mother – and I don’t care to test the waters again.

But honestly, the tedium of it all. At least once every morning I consider abandoning the whole thing – ‘The Routine’ as I call it – but then I remember that I like people too much, that I love conversation, and that I want to keep participating in the world at close range.

Because no, beauty isn’t just what’s on the inside. Life is not a pithy Instagram quote. We are deeply aesthetic creatures and not just since the invention of iPhone filters. The desire for beauty – or at least the absence of so-called ugliness – is hardwired within us. Babies prefer pretty faces.

Since we first stood up and had a good look around, humans have naturally associated physical attractiveness with the things that make for a good reproductive mate: physical health, youthfulness and fertility. Yes, social media has amplified and distorted everything in its bid to burn down the world, but the simple fact is that the notion of beauty is grounded in evolution. Inconvenient but inescapable.

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But what even is it? What is beauty? In researching my latest novel, which explores the themes of beauty and vulnerability, I stumbled across a book called A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In its pages, the author Edmund Burke tries to pin down what beauty actually is; whether it’s even a thing at all, or just an idea. Burke is the sort of guy who needs to fully understand something before accepting its existence.

First, he determines what beauty isn’t. It is not, he argues, a question of proportion. Ugly buildings can be in perfect proportion, he says, as can ugly people. Nor is fitness a factor, and by fitness he means utility: the peacock cannot fly. Equally, perfection does not equate to beauty, Burke argues, writing, ‘Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.’

And then he sets out to prove what beauty is, which universal factors are common to anything that excites passion and joy. He interrogates beauty everywhere – from the neck of a woman to the stem of a flower to the curve of a vegetable – ultimately concluding that beauty is yes, indeed a thing, and that its determining factors are (weirdly enough) smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy and colour.

So, there you go.

Of course, these factors don’t neatly explain the very subjectivity of beauty – why we’re instinctively attracted to certain people, why particular aesthetic traits trip our hearts or make us look away. Why tall balding Italians in bookstores are not safe from my advances. The sheer human complexity of this is beautiful in itself. 

Even subjectively, though, most people don’t like the look of scars. They remind us of pain.

I’m not grateful for my scars (though perhaps I should be – they are evidence of healing, of survival), but I am very grateful for the existence of beauty and for our inherent capacity to divine it.

I have learnt the hard way that people really do judge books by their covers. I do it myself. It pays to remember sometimes that there is so much beyond what we see, behind the bathroom mirror, beneath the layers. 

Beauty is worth penetrating.

Carrie Cox is a journalist and author based in Perth, Western Australia. She has published a non-fiction book, You Take the High Road and I’ll Take the Bus, based on her weekly satirical column for multiple Australian newspapers, and two previous novels – Afternoons with Harvey Beam and So Many Beats of the Heart. Her new novel, Storylines (Affirm Press), $34.99, is available now. 

Feature image: Supplied.

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