I should start off by saying that I think that particularly beautiful people are also particularly strange-looking people. I always find that my eyes need time to adjust to looking at such people. It could be because their features are unusually symmetrical. In some cases though, it is the unique alignment of  features compels you to spend more than few moments to map their faces.

When I first saw a photo of Kristina, I stared for a long time. I was very taken by her beauty but at the same I couldn't ignore the niggling sense of discomfort I had about her apparent, obvious beauty. It took someone else to point out to me that she is not beautiful in the way you'd expect a little girl to be. Her beauty is the envy of women-- a mature beauty not one that you would normally associate with a pre-pubescent child. 

 There is something frightening about the way the developed features on her face contrast with her girlish body. But what is interesting is that the kind of beauty that Kristina has is in fact in tandem with standards of beauty that modern society exalts. In many ways,  Kristina looks like a Barbie doll.  But like I said earlier, she also represents what many adult women view as beauty--the scary thing is they not only want her face but her body. The obsession with thigh gaps and being skinny while still having sculpted, defined facial features is to me a conscious (or unconscious) rejection of the natural form of the post-pubescent female body. So maybe why many women are intrigued by Kristina's beauty is because she is halfway between everything they cannot be anymore and who they still can be.

At this juncture, I suppose I am stating the obvious when I say that our notions of beauty are warped and confused. But more than that, because beauty is ambiguous I am uncomfortable with the idea of beauty blogs. First of all, beauty is an unmerited and random gift. Secondly, I find that several beauty bloggers in Singapore anyway are only "beautiful" because of the amount of cosmetic modifications they make to their faces and bodies. From their constructed eyebrows to the eye make up and excessive amounts of foundation, I honestly think that several of these women would look incredibly unremarkable without the great amount of makeup that they don. Now there is nothing wrong with looking unremarkable of course and in some ways I think to be uniquely unremarkable is preferable to perpetuating an artificially-constructed, homogenous representation of beauty. Also, is being beautiful/being able to make yourself look "beautiful" a skill or talent? I mean not everyone who posts a selfie of themselves on Instagram is model.

The thing is, what I say matters as much as it doesn't. While I believe it's still important for me to remember that beauty is not a talent or skill (as opposed to modelling for example) I also perhaps need to learn to be less disgruntled by reality. The truth is that superficiality and sex sells. And some girl's (or boy's)  double-reflection selfie (is that what it's called??)  is always going to be more popular  than an intelligent article about religious tensions or cultural appropriation or anything that actually matters. I don't think I've reconciled how to feel about our notions of beauty yet, but for now I feel equal parts amusement and trepidation about what this means for our global society going forward.