Pretty People Really Do Have It Better

When you’re young, you come to know quite quickly who’s pretty and who isn’t. If you’re pretty, people will tell you often and upfront. And if prettiness isn’t your overwhelmingly defining feature, people will use other complimentary adjectives to encourage you: smart, clever, fastidious, well-behaved, talented, funny, etc. “Creative” was a big one for me. An adult told me once when I was about 12 that I would understand I was pretty when I was older. I remember at the time feeling a kind of dread about the futility of an unformed future and its uncertain promises.

“Pretty” is wholly subjective, of course. When I was growing up in the ’90s, it was mostly defined as being thin, white, cisgender, and feminine. And while that lens has broadened quite a bit now, those markers are still generally the easiest to benefit from if you hit them.

The social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off as smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous. If you’re hot, your dating app matches will never run empty. People will buy you drinks at bars, randomly do nice things for you, give you gifts, and generally go out of their way for you. Economic advantages abound, too: attractive people are more likely to receive raises, promotions, and be heard in the workplace, and the perception of their productivity and value to a company is outsized. There are several studies that examine the power of pretty privilege and the unbalanced life experiences of those who have it.

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There’s a psychological term for the cognitive bias we have when making judgments about a person, brand, or place: the “halo effect” shows how our initial positive impressions tend to influence our overall judgments of one another. 

Pretty privilege is a form of self-sustaining energy, in that way—all the positive feedback that attractive people receive instills a kind of self-worth in them that they are indeed deserving of everything they desire, which makes their endeavors that much more persuasive. After all, believing in yourself is necessary for others to believe in you too. 

This also explains why hot people who commit crimes are less likely to be arrested or convicted (or more likely to receive lenient sentences). See: “hot convict” Jeremy Meeks, whose mugshot went viral on Facebook in 2014 after he was arrested on felony weapons charges during a gang sweep in Stockton, Calif. Meeks became a professional model and actor after having served half of his 27-month sentence. Not many people know what happened to the other purported gang members who were also arrested and incarcerated from that sweep, presumably because their mug shots were not as noteworthy. It’s also how a fake German heiress can spin a Netflix series and reality TV show out of defrauding hundreds of thousands of dollars from the New York City elite, after ample splashy media coverage.

No one has the power to choose the face and body they are born with, but a person can gain pretty privilege by acquiring attractive features through cosmetic manipulation. I’ve never been more assured that pretty privilege is real and powerful than when I’ve intentionally and laboriously leaned into perceived femininity—long, flowing weaves, false lashes, makeup, heels. But there are certain provisions to the ways that pretty privilege works, and generally it calls for a kind of beauty that appears convincingly “natural” in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue with beauty. And we all know that “natural” is as subjective of a word as “pretty.”

We don’t really have a collective name for whatever the opposite of natural beauty is, but the word “fake”—implying undesirable traits like untrustworthiness and dishonesty—is liberally applied to those sporting visible makeup or cosmetic enhancement. The most neutral terms we can manage are “low maintenance” and “high maintenance.” And “high maintenance” is pretty much always used in a pejorative sense when describing a person. “Low maintenance” implies the kind of virtue inherent in a lack of vanity (or beauty routine). If you only ever buy beauty and personal care products marketed toward “normal” skin and hair—and no one ever tells you “You’d look so much better if…”—congratulations, you can enjoy a peaceful, low-maintenance life.

Read More: Not Even the Kardashians Can Keep Up With Their Unrealistic Beauty Standards

“Normal” is a made-up term when it comes to beauty products. There is no normal police; it is not a benchmark regulated by any governing scientific, industrial, or medical body. Rather, it instead refers to the larger culture at hand’s idea of what is baseline acceptable. Opting out of beauty’s machinations is something that mostly people with pretty privilege can manage without risking social stigma. You’re considered low maintenance if you don’t fuss over your appearance beyond basic hygiene while still appearing appealing, but you’ve let yourself go if you don’t fuss over your appearance beyond basic hygiene and don’t fulfill a certain level of conventional attractiveness.

Pretty privilege is an uncomfortable topic, both for those who are overlooked or dismissed in favor of preferable looks, and for those whose successes and individual agency are undermined as a by-product of their appearance. And for women, pretty privilege plays a much more outsized role because women remain broadly objectified by society; our looks are often the most prioritized asset we have to bargain with, and looking the part is always requisite to getting the part. I like to think that my ample skill, experience, and charm make me a qualifying candidate for most jobs, but I am willing to bet from experience that optics have always prevailed where doubt may linger.

Beauty and attraction are incredibly subjective, but privilege is often based in institutional and established cultural beliefs, lots of which blend racism and colorism, sexism, fatphobia, ableism, ageism, and other appearance-based discriminations into their perceptions of beauty. Those who experience these prejudices often spend so much of their time performing their value, reassuring others of their capabilities as they navigate their own self-doubt. The virtues projected onto beauty work just as much against those who don’t fulfill beauty’s ideals. It’s not ugliness that is the assumed opposite of beauty—it’s abnormality.

But there’s a plot twist: an absence of pretty privilege doesn’t necessarily condemn you to a life less extraordinary. People are dynamic, attraction is fickle, and charm, intelligence, and wit will get you a lot further than looks can (even if you have to put more effort in them). Our appetite for beauty demands some variety, and if everyone looks the same then prettiness becomes redundant and boring. Humans aren’t completely shallow, despite unflattering evidence that may suggest otherwise. It’s our experiences and privileges that grant us access to resources for individual resistance; how we’re born into the world and how we’re taught to perceive ourselves determines how much we can cash in on those privileges.

And it turns out that the halo effect works both ways—your personality and behaviors play a big part in how hot people think you are. Being cool, kind, and doing “good things” can change how a person’s attractiveness is perceived, namely by increasing it. Talent bias, wealth bias, good deed bias, BDE (big dick energy)—they all contribute to people thinking you’re hotter than the sum of your physical attributes. In one study, subjects were shown images of the same person with different personality descriptors. Images accompanied by verbal descriptions of their generosity and kindness resulted in higher scores of facial attractiveness than when the same images were accompanied by negative traits like selfishness and unfriendliness. Personality perception affects facial attractiveness, as do other contextual elements like prior knowledge of a person and their role in your social community. Generally speaking, good behavior and positive attributes make you more attractive.

Looks do matter—sometimes, a bit too much, it feels like—because they’re a conduit to power. There’s a reason pretty privilege is, in fact, a privilege; it makes life easier by the status it grants. But the thing about beauty is that it often usurps other positive qualities a person might possess. Prettiness is a passive trait, after all. It’s a common assumption that classic hotties must not have had to develop any other redeeming characteristics because beauty is the ultimate redemption. It’s important to remember that hotness and desirability are made up of so much more than the sum of your most desirable physical features. They’re encompassed by a host of nonphysical attributes that contribute to how you’re perceived, including the idiosyncrasies and quirks of your personality.

I have a theory that everyone is hot, it’s just that some people know it and some people are not yet aware of it. Often the difference between the two is confidence—it doesn’t even have to be real; fake it ‘til you make it, as they say. Plus, with so much applied aesthetics in our faces all the time now, beauty fatigue is real. We crave personality, unique quirks, and the kind of charm that comes from a life less polished. I mean, there’s nothing less cool than conforming to society’s standards, and that includes beauty. Sometimes all it takes is enough time to pass for that thing you were insecure about (freckles, gap teeth, too-thick eyebrows, no eyebrows, scars, et cetera) to have its moment in the limelight, and for you realize that your insecurity doesn’t define who you are. If anything, it proves to you that it’s all made up, and you can release yourself from appearance anxiety, bit by bit as time goes on. Owning your individual quirks and what makes you you is always hot behavior. When I think about what attracts me to people, it’s always something about their outlook on life, their warmth and generosity of spirit, how comfortable they are in their own skin, and the solidness of their presence, which is often some enigmatic thing that tells me they know what’s up. Energy always pulls where beauty falls short.

Excerpted from Die Hot With a Vengeance, provided courtesy of Dey Street/HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2024 by Sable Yong.