I am an unabashed aesthete, and nothing has made this clearer than the arrival of Spring. I indulge in blue skies, sundresses, and my favorite patch of flowers by the corner of Campus Drive and Mayfield. Last night, climbing a fire escape, I sat on a step and watched the giant moon rise, around it pale clouds and a halo of light.

I am captivated by beauty, and so too, I believe, is much of the world. We romanticize it, we objectify humans and items as beautiful, and regardless of our approach to beauty, one thing is clear: we enjoy it.

And while we all have different preferences, I also believe that we have a general agreement as to what is beautiful. After all, we can probably all concur that an airbrushed, photoshopped and bronzed Gisele Bundchen is more beautiful than some regular Jane in a ratty T-shirt at Walmart. And because of this standard of beauty, because of the social pressure to believe in this standard, refraining from judging a book by its cover becomes more difficult.

All this would just be observations if there were no hard-hitting implications for the way we situate ourselves relative to these judgments. Unfortunately, because of this high-pressured focus on aesthetics, problems arise in how we view ourselves and how we want others to view us physically. More often than not, it becomes easy to aspire to these standards of aesthetics, and see it as a bar to quantify our self-worth.

I was surprised by the emphasis on the human aesthetic when I first came to Stanford. Despite my position as an aesthete, I never found myself thinking much about how I looked in the eyes of others. Part of this I attribute to being a heterosexual growing up in a girls’ school, where I was more preoccupied with passing physics than charming girls. Moreover, I was raised to conceptualize beauty in a very different way, largely through the admiration of beauty in art and literature rather than in human beings. Granted, I did have enduring crushes on random Irish boy bands. Yet, translating the importance of looks from the realm of celebrity worship to my day-to-day living constantly escaped me.

Stanford cranked up the pressure. I was suddenly confronted with people who worked out obsessively, girls who spent hours on their hair and face every day, guys that had more hair products than my packrat of a grandmother…for the first time, I felt very conscious about the way I looked.

The effect this had on me was not devastatingly unhealthy, but self-consciousness introduced pressures into my life that detracted from other priorities. I began worrying about how I looked partying on a Saturday night rather than just going out and having fun. I spent time wondering if my hair was straight enough, if my belly was too big, or if my city girl Oxfords were too formal for California.

Eventually, I came to the realization that none of this was really important, at least not important enough to merit unending worry on my part. On my deathbed, I rationalized, the battle between Oxfords and Uggs would hardly matter. Likewise – extrapolating this notion to the concept of social interaction – if I hung out with my friends, I would do so because I liked them as people and not as Abercrombie models.

Yet, I could not get away from this idea of beauty, away from the notion that something mysterious and wonderful exists, giving pleasure to the mind and senses. And if I longed for it, and wanted to embody it, how could I do so without thinking about my muffin-tops, dinosaur eyebags and other supposed faults?

Leaving freshman year behind made me pursue all these ideas. I wanted greatly to be a beautiful person, but in a way that I felt was worthwhile, such that I as a personality and not as a face could embody the ideal. I began enjoying making people happy. I stopped having crushes on celebrities, even Irish ones. And it has come to a point where I wake up in the morning and I am wholly validated by the knowledge that just by being who I am, I have the power to make somebody just the tiniest bit happier.

I wonder how many people feel beautiful this way. I overhear all the time the comment that men like dumb, hot ladies and that girls like jacked dudes who are awful to everybody around them. This strange notion that beautiful people can lack a likeable personality is something I find hard to believe, and in the long-run, cannot seem to hold true. While I can occasionally be enamored by chiseled jawlines, sun-kissed skin or dashing faces, when I am, it lasts for about a couple of hours.

“Oh, okay,” I say after the hours end, quite like how one would expect Homer Simpson to say, “Durrrrr.”

If you think about it, what is in a body? Fifty years and parts of us fall off, metabolism goes down, everybody goes into an age crisis. I believe that there needs to be a foundation of a likeable personality to support any notion of beauty – personalities genuine, lovely and/or endearing, with characteristics that endure over time. And if a once-shallow aesthete like me can come to this conclusion, I hope I am joining the ranks of many.

@@line:Sam points, laughs and gets bored of the cruel, unkind and ugly…even the cruel, unkind and ugly-shaped like Abercrombie models. Do you? Share your thoughts at [email protected].