She's so gorgeous, but..

Is appearance important?

We’re reminded almost daily that true beauty lies on the inside and that the ‘shell’ of our bodies is a merely superficial insight into who we really are.

It has to be said though, that appearance is important. 

Hear me out. Go for a job interview, and you’ll dress smartly, make sure you’ve had a shower and all that jazz, spritzed on your ‘fumes and applied appropriate warpaint for the occasion, because you know the drill: ‘first impressions are key, and people make up their minds about whether they like a person or not within the first ten seconds or so of meeting them’.

 In that sense then, appearance is paramount, though of course you have to have also had these essential qualities:

-Experience

-Passion for your job – even if that means saying you desire to make sandwiches forever (yes, I am a woman, but really…?) Seriously though, you just have to make yourself passionate about it.

-Team-building skills

-The ability to make a good cup of tea – NB -essential for Starbucks.

-Whatever else lights the boss’s fire

Jokes aside though, appearance is important, whether we like it or not. People make value judgements on who you are and what you’re about based on what you look like. This is just a fact of life, and whilst it isn’t ideal, its just the way it is. My point is that it isn’t everything. 

But I'm a girl who owns a lot of clothes, wears make up every day, and makes a general effort with her appearance. 

Perhaps I’m not the best person to be making this point.

Yes, fair play, I do own all of these things, but they don’t wear me, I wear them. When I get out of the shower, hair like knotted rat’s tails, no make up on etc, I’m just a blank canvas, like the rest of the world, and it gives me great pleasure to ‘accessorise’ myself the way I do. The way I look has massively changed since I went to uni, so I've experiment loads with hair cuts and colours. I started with blue hair 2 inches long, but my now natural blonde hair has now gotten long (FINALLY!!!…) enough that I can wear it in fancy updos, leave it natural, curl it, back-comb it, tie it up, wear it down, whatever I like. I have a crazy amount of make up, so I can either choose to wear none, go neutral, go retro, go rock, go fresh, go bright, the list goes on. I have all manner of clothes too and combined with everything else it means that I can change my image everyday to represent the me on the inside that everybody rightly says is so important. This is how I exercise my personality, although it isn’t everything to me. 

Some girls, (and boys too) let their images wear them, and whilst friends have joked about my ‘indie barrier’, I actually love experimenting with all kinds of images and styles just as I do with my music, especially now that I’m single, demonstrating how open minded I am about the way people should look, and how loosely I define my appearance. I have days where I'll just wear jeans and a hoodie, but usually if I'm at home, I'll wear a dress, and I'll have at least some make up on, not because I need to, but because that's just me, and how I exercise my inner identity.

Maybe we do see appearance as important, but that shouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. However, at the end of the day, if she’s gorgeous, but a cow, or he’s sexy as, but arrogant with an ego to match, where’s the incentive to want to know them? At the end of the day, a pretty face is nothing without a decent personality to back it up with.