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Beauty Was Never About Your Face

Notes on beauty, privilege and the mat

· @Erika

My feature paid my tuition

I modeled through university. The work paid well, and I graduated without a single student loan. People I studied with are still paying off their degrees. I paid for mine with my looks.

For years I told that story as luck, or as hustle. It took me much longer to tell it honestly. Beauty is not a gift that falls on random people. It is a currency, and someone else sets the exchange rate.

I am tall, slim and evenly proportioned. My skin and lips are not “too” dark. I was born to an American father and a Filipina mother whose family carries Chinese and Spanish ancestry. Put those facts together, and you get a face the world has been trained to reward.

Beauty is a ranking, not a compliment

We are taught to treat beauty like weather: it happens to you, kindly or cruelly. I no longer believe that. Beauty is a set of preferences that sorts bodies, and the sorting keeps the existing order in place. The fashionable shape shifts from curvy to waif-thin to athletic. The color at the top rarely moves.

The sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it bluntly in her essay “In the Name of Beauty”: in a society built on whiteness, some women are shut out of beauty by design, whatever they look like or do. Others are let in, but on loan, and they lose their place with age, weight or illness. Neither group wrote the rules. Both are kept busy obeying them.

The view from the middle

In the Philippines, the ranking is sold in small sachets at every sari-sari store: whitening soap, whitening lotion, glutathione. Mestiza, the mixed, lighter-skinned face, has been the highest compliment for generations, and it carries colonial history in its pocket. By some measure, I am the face the sachets promise.

I have lived in countless countries, and the same face has been read differently in each. That tells me beauty is not a fact about a body. It is a judgment a place makes about it.

I have been called exotic, a word that admires and sets apart in one breath. I have been treated as the acceptable version of difference: brown enough to seem interesting, close enough to whiteness to seem safe. Doors opened that I never had to knock on.

None of that was earned. It was the ranking paying me for proximity, and the payment was drawn from women it had decided to leave out. Living in the middle does not exempt me. It shows me the machinery.

The same gaze, a different garment

Since September, girls under 14 in Austria have been banned from wearing a headscarf at school. The law targets head coverings worn “in accordance with Islamic traditions.” If a teacher sees one, the teacher must ask the girl to take it off. If it keeps happening, her parents can be fined between €150 and €800.

The government calls this protection. In parliament, one coalition leader argued that the headscarf sexualises girls. Read that again. A room of adults decided what a twelve-year-old’s head means, and then decided the cure was to uncover it.

This is the beauty ranking wearing the uniform of law. It runs on the same assumption: the European, uncovered body is the free default, and every other body has to justify itself. A girl with bare hair is seen as a girl. A girl in a hijab is seen as a problem to be solved.

Austria has been here before. In 2020, the Constitutional Court struck down a ban for girls under 10, finding it discriminated against Muslims and broke the state’s duty of religious neutrality. The Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ) is now challenging the new law as well.

I lived in the Middle East for many years, so I know the pressure can run the other way. A woman’s body can be pushed toward covering, and that is control too. But the answer to one set of eyes on a girl’s body is not a second set of eyes with the power of the state behind it. A freedom enforced by fines and delivered by a teacher’s instruction is not freedom. It is a change of owner.

The question is never “covered or uncovered?” It is “who decides?” Whether the instruction comes from a family, a religious authority, a modeling agency or a parliament, the girl is still being told that her body is a public statement she does not get to write.

What this has to do with the mat

Yoga spaces are not neutral ground. Scroll any yoga feed and you meet the industry’s own beauty economy: thin, young, flexible, serene, mostly white and almost always uncovered. A body like mine fits that picture easily, and I keep asking what that ease costs others. How many women in hijab see themselves in our marketing? How many feel they must explain what they wear before they can unroll a mat?

Advaita Vedanta teaches that the Self is not the body, not the mind, not the roles we play. Neti, neti: not this, not this. It is one of the most liberating teachings I know, and one of the easiest to misuse. “We are all one consciousness” can become an elegant way for those who benefit from a hierarchy to declare it unreal before they have stopped benefiting from it.

The tradition offers a better tool: two levels of truth. Paramarthika is the absolute; vyavaharika is the everyday world of bodies, laws and transactions. At the absolute level, no face ranks above another and no garment makes a soul less free. At the everyday level, bodies are ranked and regulated all the time, with real consequences. Liberation in the absolute does not excuse injustice in the relative.

From my mother’s side I carry kapwa, the Filipino sense of a shared self, where the other is not truly other. That is where the two truths meet in practice. If the woman on the next mat is not other, then her hair, her scarf and her skin are not mine to rank, and not the state’s to rule on.

A practice of inquiry

Instead of affirmations, try questions. Sit with one at a time, the way you would sit with a mantra.

  1. When I look in the mirror, whose eyes am I using?
  2. Whom does my idea of “beautiful” leave out?
  3. When I see a woman who covers, what story do I tell about her, and where did I learn it?
  4. In my classes, my feed and my teachers, whose body is the default?
  5. Where have I been rewarded for being close to whiteness, and what did that reward ask of me?

I cannot give back the tuition. I can stop calling it luck, and I can stop accepting what the ranking keeps offering. That shows up in concrete choices: whose bodies I hold up as the shape of the practice, who stands at the front of the room, whose face goes on the flyer, and whether a girl in a headscarf walks into our studio and finds that nobody needs her to explain herself.

It also means speaking up when the ranking becomes law. Austria’s ban will be argued in court. It should also be argued in our studios, our classrooms and our feeds, by those of us who are never asked to remove anything.

The goal is not for everyone to feel beautiful, or to be “freed” by someone else’s definition of freedom. It is for all of us to stop needing permission. On the mat, the practice was never about how the pose looks. It was always about who is looking, and what they are free to see.

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