Why is beauty a curse

If we went grocery shopping together, random male employees would stop to ask us if we had found everything we were looking for. She was like some mystical Snow White, making the male forest creatures bow before her.

I would watch her long, golden hair swoosh around her Botticelli hips and wonder — what would it be like to be that beautiful? Then the second thought would always follow…why was Gizelle so damn unhappy all the time? When I spoke to her, it felt like I was communicating with a fembot programmed not to display emotion. Every time I asked her opinion on a subject, her eyes stilled even more.

At times, she reminded me of a delicate butterfly pinned under museum glass. Beautiful to look at, but still undeniably dead. It is not hard to see why I was confused by her melancholy. Beautiful people spend their lives being given more than plain-looking people. Studies show they make more money , babies look at them longer , and they even cause our brains to pump out more dopamine when we gaze upon their loveliness.

Life must be pretty sweet for the beautiful ones. Or so I thought. I would ask her about her many suitors and they all ended in the same tragic tale — they dated her for a month or two and then tossed her aside. Beauty alone could not hold their attention. Because she knew something about this gift, the gods had bestowed upon her — it was not hers to keep. Think about that for a moment. Imagine being admired all your life for something that you would eventually lose? Imagine having an exceptional gift for playing the piano or developing a world-renown reputation for quantum physics, but by fifty, the gift would begin to fade away.

While in the past, I had cried Kavanagh tears when anyone lamented how hard it was to be thin or pretty, I now began to feel sorry for beautiful people. I began to understand being a goddess is not an easy gig. A study from The Journal of Positive Psychology found attractive supermodels had a lower sense of well-being than average-looking people.

When you are beautiful, it is the first and often the last thing people see. Working as a fitness model and lifestyle coach, she is now empowering other women to find and embrace their inner and outer beauty, in the way that she finally has. Unlike MCurnow, author and confidence coach Katinda Ndola, 44, embraced her beauty from a young age. She described herself as a woman many women love to hate. She was also conscious that people assumed her success was down to her looks, rather than talent.

A series of experiments by the University of Michigan found that good looks equated to better pay and better social skills, as well as being perceived as more capable by employers. Similarly, another study found that physically attractive people were perceived as more dominant, sexually warmer, mentally healthier and more intelligent than physically unattractive people.

Yet, there was very little literature or research around the disadvantages of beauty, perpetuating the idea that all that glitters is indeed gold.

Every talent or grace or joy feels like something we all participate in, because it belongs to our species and our universe. My first apartment was in a nondescript, century-old brick building that faced a stately building with limestone trim, bay windows, and ornate balconies. Lately I have been researching the life of an extraordinary woman, a soil scientist who loved nature so fiercely it was like a second marriage, and who dedicated herself to conservation.

There are running jokes about Pat Jones showing up at a store or restaurant with her hair uncombed, her farm clothes caked in mud and sweat—or wearing jeans to a cocktail party and hooking her thumbs in the belt loops, clearly uncomfortable, missing her country life. When I found pictures of her at sixteen and twenty, I was startled by how lovely she was, her features finely drawn and clean-boned, her eyes bright, her skin translucent. Scottish and plainspoken, she put far more stock in candor and a sense of humor than in social graces and illusions.

They want proof that they spent time with you. Beauty can make it harder to reach that place. When your appearance charms people, they have a hard time noticing the rest of you, whereas if you are plain, you can you must figure out for yourself who you are. What if nothing of substance lies beneath that hypnotic surface? And the sweetness can quickly turn to poison: In the French crime series Spiral , a young woman is killed and her face then beaten into pulp. Mercifully, psychopathy is the exception.

Most days, beauty opens doors—it makes people assume success and virtue and want to offer favors and opportunities. It attracts. But even that has an endpoint: Studies show that beautiful women hit a glass ceiling even faster. At the extreme, those who were outright gorgeous did better than those so cute they were intimidating.