There is a strange thing that happens with very beautiful people. After a while, you stop seeing the beauty. Not literally, you’ve still got eyes, you still register the cheekbones and the jaw and the whole unfair genetic lottery of it. But your brain files it as information fairly quickly. Yes, yes, gorgeous, delicious. Noted. And then, you start looking for the personality underneath.

Pretty privilege usually gets talked about as what beauty gets you. the obvious better treatment, more attention, the benefit of the doubt granted almost immediately. People forgive you faster, assume competence before you’ve proven yourself.

What’s interesting to me is what beauty might let a person skip.

So much of what makes someone interesting is something they had to build out of necessity. Wit is usually a defence a person develops because of having to interact with people in rooms that were intimidating. Most people’s personality is closer to scar tissue than talent, the thing you morph into after years of working out who you were when the world wasn’t a safe place.

Friction makes things/people interesting.

So what happens someone who gets less of it? If a room bends around you before you’ve said a word, there’s not much pushing you to work out what you were going to say in the first place.

Beauty usually gets treated like currency, something you spend and get value back for. There’s another way to think about it though: as insulation. A thin layer between a person and the ordinary friction that forces the rest of us to grow any texture at all.

Doesn’t means every beautiful person is a blank surface, that would be nonsense. Plenty of the most beautiful people anyone knows are also the strangest, funniest, smart, most specific people in the room. But extreme social reward can quietly take the pressure off developing any of that, at least for a while, and a while is sometimes all it takes.

beauty also brings its own friction, of course. Being looked at is not the same as being seen. People arrive with an entire personality already written for you, and you spend half your time either living up to it or trying to convince them they’ve got the wrong person. There’s the suspicion that your achievements have been handed to you, that your kindness is flirtation, that your silence is arrogance. Even your insecurities can seem like an insult to people who think you’ve already won the genetic lottery. And perhaps that’s where the argument gets interesting. Beauty might spare you the effort of getting through the door, but it can make it extraordinarily difficult to know why anyone wanted you in the room in the first place. You can spend your whole life being desired without knowing whether you’ve ever been understood.

Which is probably why I notice it so much when a beautiful person does something a little off. The stunning woman with the horrendous, joyful, snorting laugh. The gorgeous man who turns out to be the kindest soul or the one who knows how to fix the fuse box when it trips. The second something unexpected happens, the face drops down the list of interesting things about them, and you finally meet whoever’s in there.

The real danger of being born extraordinarily good-looking looks nothing like a danger from the outside, since it already looks so much like winning. It COULD, thought, convince a person, far too early, that just showing up already counts as the whole job. When the world gives you too much, very early, it can make you believe you have already given the world enough.