Beauty and the Beasties

Our reactions and relationships to beauty are complicated. Our thoughts about beauty affect our lives as we judge ourselves and interact with others. To narrow the subject just a bit, I thought it might be interesting to draw upon my expertise in Home Staging. There are interesting similarities between how a home is designed to sell and our own concept of how we judge each other and ourselves as beautiful or not.

As a Home Stager and realtor I spent a good bit of time considering what might be beautiful to a prospective home buyer. I know from experience that buyers want to enter a prospective home and see their ‘beautiful life’. When a home is staged well, they visualize family and friends enjoying food and conversation around a kitchen bustling with aromatic smells and tastes. In their mind's eye, they might see a highlight reel of activity that’s appealing and beautiful to them.

For those who don’t know exactly what a Home Stager does, here’s my description:

A good stager optimizes a home for potential buyers so they fall in love with it and want to buy it. A stager will view the home through many lenses when designing a staging plan for the seller. The first lens is a home's physical elements, its architecture, location, price point, age and condition. Next a stager looks at the likely profile of the buyer, and what current trends they might expect in that home. This is an ‘appearance’ list and includes color schemes, accessories, lighting, painting, minor fix-ups, curb appeal, and how the home functions. The last lens a stager considers is intangible elements. This list would consider focal points, balance, texture, color, cohesiveness of design and flow. After staging, your house should look both captivating and believable.

As the collage above puts it, “truth is beauty”. At the end of the staging process, the staged house needs to show as believable and congruent. For example, does the home look like a really nice home or a hotel room? Does the design inside reflect the architecture and gardens outside?

So, what makes a prospective buyer’s heart leap out of their chest and say, “This is my HOME!”? Are they the same reasons that cause people to appreciate and say, from the heart, that the person they're looking at is gorgeous?

Like our staged home, the first lens people look through to judge beauty is physical. I don’t think we can legitimately rule that one out even if we wanted to. According to Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy (*See link below), an expert in first impressions, this first impression is actually a split second judgment to determine our safety and survival. If the person or the house is deemed trustworthy, believable and authentic, we are likely to respond to both with warmth and openness.

Our second lens in staging is based on an appearance checklist. Often the buyer has a list in their head that they’re comparing the staged house to. The buyer starts that checklist as they drive up to the home and if there are 3 or more major negatives in the house, the buyer usually just walks away. A person starts their checklist the minute they look at someone for longer than a few seconds, or enough time to assess whether to engage with interest. Do they look appealing? Do their clothing, style and age look believable? OR, if not, do they carry their look well and does it reflect their personality?

The last lens through which we see our typically staged home and other people are the intangibles. A person’s intangibles are learned from experience, upbringing, education, status in the society or country they live in, and their family’s biases and prejudices learned while growing up. Through all those learned, experienced and historic factors, we make a judgment of whether they are beautiful or not, worthy of a second glance, or not.

In our staged home, we might start envisioning how we could live there, which room would the kids want. Could I make an amazing meal in this kitchen or have a family BBQ in the backyard? Through this lens we start the process of visualizing how we’d interact with each other and what kind of life we could enjoy in this new house.

Now to the “beasties” or how our own beauty concept affects us as we judge ourselves and interact with others. Beasties, the way I’m using the word, are the negative prompts our ego might make or the ‘what ifs’ sparked by uncertainty or perhaps a lack of confidence. In our house example, a beastie is something that rules the house out for the buyer even though it ticks all the other boxes. The house you’re looking at is drop-dead gorgeous but the dog barking incessantly right next door would drive you crazy after a while. It could be loud traffic noise that would also interfere with your enjoyment of the otherwise beautiful home.

A beastie, when interacting with people, is anything the observer considers out of the ordinary in appearance, action or personality. We might compare a beautiful person to ourselves and completely derail any kind of wholesome interaction because we judge ourselves less than the other. Maybe we’ve been told a certain part of our body is ugly so judge ourselves as an ugly person. One of my ‘beasties’ would be someone who doesn’t close their mouth while chewing. It wouldn’t matter how beautiful he or she looked. The sound of crunched food and smacking lips while bits of food spew out of their mouth looks disgusting and makes me want to run away screaming. Everyone can remember something the other kids made fun of growing up. Those are beasties, too.

Here’s a personal example of a judgment beastie. When I was in my early teens, my mother was talking with a group of ladies around the kitchen table. They were talking about my sisters and I and how different we looked. In other words, our physical attributes made the overall impression of each of us look quite different. The youngest had striking blonde hair and whiter skin that people said looked cute. The middle child had facial features that people called pretty to all who saw her. Then they looked at me. I was at least a foot taller than both younger sisters and really didn’t have much of a look other than tall and somewhat awkward. My mother said that I looked different but interesting, kind of like Eleanor Roosevelt. She said it with admiration so I was flattered until I looked her up in our Encyclopedia Britannica and was completely crushed at what I saw. All I saw at that age was Eleanor’s heavy bags under her eyes, her crooked teeth and big bushy eyebrows and made a judgment that she was “ugly”. Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the people I greatly admire today, but it was an unfortunate remark that made me think I was ugly but interesting for a very long time.

This is such a huge topic and I’ve barely scratched the surface. I haven’t talked about how social media and advertising influence our concept of beauty. Nor have I addressed beauty biases between sexes or how the concept of beauty has changed over time. Here’s the thing. Today we can start eliminating beasties by re-evaluating whatever we’ve experienced or grown up with. If that beastie event caused or produced trauma, there are many ways of dealing with it. If a pattern of beastie events became a block, doing the healing work is how people grow, develop and evolve.

That’s why looking at our life’s patterns and blockages is so valuable. From the manuscript of my first book:

I also did a lot of forgiveness work for resenting those beautiful people who showed up in my life to encourage my growth by exposing blocks. We hold onto those blocks for a reason so it can be soul wrenching work to reach in and look at what is stopping us from moving forward.

Back to beauty in the home. Our staged home likely features objects or intangibles that our buyer falls in love with that prompt visions of living in that home. For example, our buyer lights up when looking at the beautiful painting highlighted on a feature wall. Maybe that feature wall is above a fireplace that is radiating warmth and is something the buyer has always wanted in a home. The home evokes positive emotions for the buyer in an intangible but powerful way.

As to the beautiful person we’re looking at, beauty is always an inside job and starts with loving ourselves. When we love ourselves, we are beautiful to ourselves no matter what our appearance is, no matter how many beasties are in the way, no matter what anyone else says. When we connect with our soul, our inside light shines on the outside and that intangible force is our beautiful presence. That beauty is truth and can’t be turned on and off.

*https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-psychologist-amy-cuddy-how-people-judge-you-2016-1