"Beauty is pain."

You have to admit there is something insidious and awful about our beauty standards, a vicious cycle that regardless of sex, gender or culture, eats away at your psyche. Others pay attention to your beauty, so you pay attention to your beauty, more effort is put into it, which makes you value it more (effort justification is a very real psychological bias) which gathers more attention, which makes you pay even more attention. Adjusting your hair, fixing your breasts, puffing out your chest, putting on makeup, flexing your biceps, all eventually futile when someone who won the genetic lottery marches in wearing better clothes than you.

Googling something along the lines of 'the psychology of beauty' lets you see the wealth of science and effort detailing how our arbitrary beauty standards are detrimental to our mental (and sometimes even physical) health. And these beauty standards are commercialized, via air-brushing, photo-shopping, vanity sizing (companies sizing clothes smaller than they are so they sell better); the list is as long as it is horrifying. I did it as research for this article and it even surprised this jaded, cynical twenty-year-old man.

And as a man I find these article relevant because I'm certainly around lots of these discussions about beauty. Who's prettier, who's hot, who can we get with. Usually at parties, when the males crowd around the sofas and beer pong tables into some weird fortress of flannel and musk. I usually just nod my head at those talks, try to not look uncomfortable and wait for this weird ritual to be over.

And woman do this too.

Woman do this more, even. Woman's scrutiny goes even deeper and specific like some odd science of appearance. Judging the lipstick color, the amount of skin revealed, is it prudish? Is it slutty? How high the heels are, how low her V-cut is, if someone is trying too hard. It would seem a lot like-

"Beauty is pain."

I mean, this is what a large portion of my female friends tell me that they've been told when they were younger. That yes, their beauty is inherent, but also that their beauty isn't. That they are a work in progress. Always. That they must suffer for their attractiveness. Heels that hurt your feet, shaving your legs, waxing your eyebrows, bras that compress your breasts, a list as long as it is uncomfortable.

So if someone wanted to draw attention to this obsession with appearance, this weird vicious cycle without simply satirizing it, but by adopting it, embracing it fully, maybe the first thing they should do is crank that absurd pain dial all the way up.

Meet Grace Neutral.

A woman from London. A tattoo covered tattoo artist/model/fashion designer who went on an artistic journey that led to her removing her belly button, and pointing her ears, and forking tongue her tongue, and scarifying her face, and plating her teeth, and plugging her nose, and tattooing her eyeballs along with a plethora of (regular?) tattoos.

All of which, very painful.

If none of those things made you wince even a little at the thought of what probably very painful procedure, she went through then you must actually be Grace Neutral, which in that case hi Grace! Huge fan here.

And I am not the only fan.

434k followers on Instagram, her own fashion line, a spot at London's Fashion Week, countless photoshoots and interviews and tattoo requests. She has a lot of attention. For some, her appeal is a kind of morbid curiosity, a psychological (sort of macabre) effect that stimulates the release of brain chemicals such as norepinephrine and dopamine, like watching a car crash. But for others, like myself, Grace Neutral is un-ironically and even objectively beautiful.

1. "But Nick, you were playing on the double meaning of beauty in this very article (and now are settling on one to further your argument)"

2. "But Nick, beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and is subjective)"

3. "But Nick, that sounds a lot like you have beauty standards (which you argued are detrimental)"

First criticism; which is probably the most important is that, yes, above I used the double meaning of word 'beauty' (mostly as a synonym for 'physically attractive') because this double meaning is inherent in the word and inherent in its cultural use. Which is how girls can be told that their beauty is inherent (beauty is a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense) and isn't inherent (beauty is hour glass figures and a booty...etc).

But that very distinction contributes to why Grace Neutral is (arguably) so beautiful because she playing all definitions of the word. Beauty is pain, and she has endured countless procedures in an effort to get the way she wants to look. Beauty is physical attractiveness, which I find to be true in her. Beauty is qualities that please the intellect and moral sense, which her 'human-ness' fulfills. Grace Neutral's own definition of beauty, which she, in an interview with Judy Godhart said is, "I guess beauty for me is just being 100% yourself..." she certainly satisfies.

Second criticism; is beauty really completely subjective? Like 100%? Like both definitions are? Because if it is then we don't really communicate anything when we say '[insert example here] is beautiful'.

Physical attractiveness certainly isn't completely subjective; there's a host of scientific articles detailing how, no matter the culture, for women the "hour glass", for men muscles, plus healthy hair and symmetrical bodies and faces actually are found to be objectively more desirable in mates. That last quality in particular stretches between animal kingdoms even.

Beauty in the 'qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense' isn't subjective either right? We certainly don't act like it is. If we did, we would have no reason for giving reasons for liking something. If someone asks "do you like [insert movie here]?" answers are given and then reasons to back those answers up. We, as a society have professional critics. There's a term for this-

The Antinomy of Taste: a term created by philosopher Immanuel Kant to describe the tension between the perceived subjectiveness of beauty and our desire to justify why we find something beautiful.

So if beauty isn't completely objective and we can have justified beauty ideas, that should bring me to my-

Third criticism; yes it does kinda sound like I have beauty standards because... maybe we should have beauty standards. Not standards on physical attractiveness that drive us insane, sometimes literally. Standards that box women into archetypes and turn males talks into some awful attractiveness tournament. But by having cultural values of beauty that help us, not hinder. We seem like we're hardwired to having them. So valuing the expressive, and the ability for appearance to be unique and challenging might be better standards. I certainly think that these qualities are objectively beautiful anyway and that we should recognize this, like we should recognize that our culture assumes that there is an objective beauty. And maybe, in an effort to make beauty not painful (least not mentally) we should start by seeing Grace Neutral as paving the way of expression, in the name of beauty.