A meditation on barbie, and beauty 🩷

“You’re beautiful.”

A silence envelopes the theatre.

“I know!” comes the elderly woman’s chortle, wrinkles transforming into an endless sea of joy.

A tear slips down Barbie’s face on screen, and many tears slip down mine offscreen. Between them, tension melts into warmth, a wordless “transaction of grace” filling the space between them. And the space really is huge — on one hand, a woman approaches the end of her life, and on the other hand, a young, plastic doll searches for her own version of “beauty”. Even their worlds are polar opposites; Barbieland is the definition of “perfect in pink”, and the real world is anything but. Yet somewhere, somehow, beauty still manages to transcend these two realities, represented by those two women.

In my seat, time seems to linger for a while. For a moment, I am Barbie, and I see the world through her startlingly innocent eyes. Enthused wonder colors my vision, and the world is truly my oyster. In that same breath, I see aging for what it is, and nothing more than that — and I think it is beautiful. Yet the gravity of the moment comes crashing down, and once again, I am reduced to a mere bystander in Barbie’s exploration of beauty.

Towards the end, a heart-wrenching rendition of “What was I made for?” seeps through the cracks of the cinematic world into my soul. Barbie closes her eyes and feels what it’s like to be a “woman”. I close my eyes and ask myself, “what was I made for, if not to be truly beautiful”? As Barbie collapses onto the floor, tirades of insults being hurled at her, I look at her pathetic, curled-up figure. If Barbie, the perfect girl, feels ugly, can I even say that I’m beautiful?

A montage of girls traversing their own journey of womanhood plays on screen, and birth, childhood and motherhood flash past my eyes. Looking at the girls morphing from child to teenager to adult right before me, breaking out of their chrysalis, repressed tears tumbled out of me cathartically. I could have watched it for hours, just taking in the breath-taking growth of each human, and in each laugh, each smile, I see myself in every scene.

Long after the ending credits had rolled, I found myself stuck in the freezing, empty cinema, my mind struggling with what I thought I knew about beautys. For the longest time, Barbie had always been the definition of the “It girl”. She’s everything a girl could ever dream of with her feminine pink and her perfect plastic features. In my life, the “It girl” exists too — she does pilates, drinks green smoothies, and is always put together.

You know you want to be HER. Because she’s IT.

In other words, I had always perceived beauty as a state of being. Much like how pictures only capture memories that slipped away into moments of time, beauty was a static snapshot of how lovely you appeared in a particular context, at a particular time. Honestly, just like America Ferrara’s monologue on how it was “impossible to be a woman”, it seemed impossible to be perfectly beautiful. Beauty cannot be materialistic, because nothing is skin-deep, and heaven forbid you neglect inner beauty. Beauty cannot be vulnerable, because that’s weak, and being weak as a woman is a double whammy. And most importantly, beauty cannot be old, because being old means being ugly. Society’s “It” must be constrained to one singular definition: thin, tall, young, effortless.

But even “It” is not cast in stone. The montage replays in my mind, and at that very moment, I’m transported back to my childhood. It wasn’t that single picture, or that single moment in time was truly ethereal. It was the lessons, the experience and the process in itself that painted such an ethereal picture.

I remember beauty being limitless in its fluidity, shape shifting according to the journey that we took to discover new things. As we grow up, beauty shifts from appreciating the process of finding joy, to an “ideal”.

However, Barbie’s encounter with the elderly woman reminded me of “It”. The elderly woman is not young, nor is she thin, tall, or effortless. She’s just unapologetically real, and Barbie sees beauty in that. The truth is, beauty isn’t really about fitting into that singular definition of an artificial “It girl”. It’s all about the path that we create, to form our own realistic iteration of the “It girl”. The “It girl” who overcame her eating disorders. The “It girl” who is fighting against her own mental health. The “It girl” who aged gracefully, wizened by her wisdom. In that montage, every single one of them are “It girls”, and so is every single woman around the world. Every “It girl” is different, but connected by a common thread — we all find beauty in the journey of living and loving well.

To quote Ruth Handler, “Humans only live once, but ideas live forever.” After all, the transcendental idea of beauty has existed long before we did, and will continue to exist long after we cease to live. My only hope is that the girls after us will not see beauty as an “ideal” to achieve, but as an “idea” that gives hope. An idea that is always in flux, the meaning of which changing as her journey in search of beauty progresses.

And to me? Yes, I can say that I am beautiful. Because everything I was, everything I am, and everything I will be represents my experience of growing up. This life is solely mine, and no one else will ever have the same one as I did. Perhaps I will never blossom into an “ideal beauty”, because an “ideal” never existed in the first place. Yet I will use my own two hands to craft and create a reality in which I can look back on my growth thus far, and say —

“You’re beautiful.”

From Su 🐳