Epitome Anatomy: Beauty

Wish gives a pep talk about the distorted beauty standards of the present. From the absurdity of Hollywood's narrow, unrealistic beauty standards to the pressures of social media perfection, Wish dishes out the real talk on embracing your unique self. With a mix of humour and heart, she urges you to ditch the filters and flaunt your true beauty. Tune in for a refreshing take on what it means to be unbothered in a world obsessed with appearances!

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Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (00:00.056)
Beauty standards nowadays are so skewed that it seems like a very ugly crowd to be in. What an oxymoron, right? Media is so hard to avoid nowadays as we have screens with all of us all the time at the palm of our hands and we see hundreds or thousands or even millions of faces whenever we scroll. We are constantly bombarded by the toxicity of what

beauty really means superficially nowadays. So I wanted to talk about this further. Welcome to Human Thesaurus Presents Epitome Anatomy. My name is Wish and I talk about something, somehow, today's second word, relevant from my life to yours.

Ready for the epitome of beauty? Let's go!

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (01:08.716)
Our keyword is beauty. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, beauty as a noun is the quality or group of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses of the mind. To further this meaning, dictionary.com offers the meaning that beauty is the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind.

whether arising from sensory manifestations like a shape, color, sound, etc. a meaningful designer pattern or something else as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest. Beauty's use was first recorded in 1225-75 in Middle English beute from the Old French beaute.

Replacing Middle English bealte from Old French beltet from unattested vulgar Latin bellitāt or stem of unattested bellitās. Ooh, I'm saying something vulgar in Latin. This is equivalent to bellus which means fine. Very complicated, eh?

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (02:37.304)
What do you hear all the time? Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But in my view, if the beholder doesn't see it for themselves, we can only see their own interpretation of their own beauty. Nowadays, my observation is that the beholder not just dictates what the state of beauty is nowadays or how beauty is perceived, it's also quite skewed or

let's say very convoluted in some ways, the dictation of where beauty lies in media, especially on social media nowadays, is in my view is alarming or preposterous or even inauthentic. Our concept of beauty individually or in a society may differ culturally though.

Also, you know, it depends on our culture or the way we live or the country where we were born from or the environment we grew up with. The essence of beauty or even the meaning of what beauty is or attractiveness may differ from person to person according to the environment and according to the exposures. And also as

unique individuals. We all have different tastes. It's as simple as, you know, you like sweet, I like salty, nobody likes bitter, or someone does, etc. So it's the same when it comes to preferences in beauty standards. So my beauty standards may be different to you. For example, I'm a butt person. I like, I appreciate nice butts. And some people may be boob.

people or they like cute to front teeth people. we all have different kind of preferences when it comes to how we define beauty for ourselves. But what I'm focusing right now for this episode is the skewed beauty standard that is being imposed or forced upon us by Hollywood in the social media culture.

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (04:57.742)
For me, looking at these faces nowadays with the buckle fat removal or baby Botox too early in the game and all of these extremes that they all look the same, I don't know how we got here. How the hell did we get here? It's mind-blowing and it's scary at the same time. I'm not scared for myself, but it's mostly for...

impressionable and insecure young people. So they keep on following this path that they want to look. However, these quote unquote natural beauties look on social media that influencers or Hollywood, they want it to do the same. Because if you're a vulnerable, impressionable person, this is what you see online or filtered. Yes, another thing that's being said.

a lot talking about what I'm talking to you right now is, you know, these filters. So you skew how you view yourself on screen and how you see everybody else. We're generalizing beauty in a way that everybody has to look the same. For me personally, that's not beauty at all. That's like photocopying or 3D printing something to

a thousand copies. There's nothing original, there's nothing natural about that. Too much exposure to thousands and multitude of faces online is not healthy for anyone and I don't think we never had this problem so much before because we're not looking at thousands of faces within the span of let's say five minutes scrolling through your phone.

This results to comparison and insecurities and all of these are overfed and overindulge and inflated. They inflate the sense of self in a bad way most of the time for impressionable people. It's just frustrating for me because, you know, on social media or let's just say let's focus on Hollywood and influencers. Sometimes I can't.

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (07:22.732)
I don't know if it's a Kardashian versus a Megan Fox or something else. Like, they all merged as one face now. Everyone seems to look the same. And then some of them, yes, like amazing doctors. They do so well when it's quite subtle. It's fantastic. Okay, it's a craft. Respect for that. But that's not what I'm getting.

myself into, my point here is really, it's really we're losing the real natural individuality that, you know, it's still celebrated. But nowadays I feel that, and I observe that individuality is now treated as fringe. Like when you see on social media, when you see a natural beauty, like someone who

who went viral recently because, you know, she's a 25 year old with a very wrinkly, dry face without anything in it and everybody made fun of her and I actually reposted that to say, girl, sunscreen, I'm not saying, I'm not hating on her. I'm just saying that she's a pretty, pretty girl but she can take care of her skin naturally. I'm not.

saying anything else beyond that, you know, there are lots of trolls around and saying something else. I mean, cowards of course will always say something. But individuality should not be fringe. Individual beauty should not be unique. What I'm saying unique as in, she's got a different face versus the other influencers and she's in the beauty community. fucking toxic beauty community, but okay, that's another topic.

It's really worrisome for me to see that a lot of younger women are destroying their face just to achieve something that cannot ever be achieved. I'm not saying that beauty is not achievable to anyone when you have some kind of a dysmorphia, a body dysmorphia or a face dysmorphia or literally just continuously and relentlessly being brutal to yourself.

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (09:42.136)
then you can never win no matter how many surgeries you do because that's from the inside. There's something wrong from the inside, not the outside. And real beauty should exude from within. It can't be just your face. It can't be just your boobs. It can't be just your long legs. It cannot be like that. Real beauty exudes from within. There are lots of beautiful people still out there.

What I'm getting into is what we see on media, which is very worrisome. The reality is there are lots of beauty that we see out there, beautiful people. And there's more of them out there than plastic, than inauthentic faces who are all looking the same or out of proportion or everybody's making themselves look aged, et cetera.

What I mentioned on the other episode that, you know, I tend to look up while walking and look into people's faces just to put myself back to this positive position that no matter what we see online, no matter what we see on social media, there are way more people who won't care on doing extreme, drastic makeover that they can't even recognize who they were in the past.

There are more people out there who may not, they may look that they don't care, but they do. Or maybe they're insecure on the inside. Going back to my interest for words, I think we have to stop using the words natural or authentic to the things that aren't on social media. I'm so sick of hearing authenticity on social media. If something is authentic,

Perhaps we don't need to really say that out loud. Because what's authentic is what's just naturally there, is present. Nobody needs to tell anyone or prove anyone if it is or if they are authentic. It will just show. And that's where authenticity lies. So going back to this beauty, we all go through different phases of our lives.

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (12:09.386)
I understand when I was a teenager that I was ugly. And I always felt ugly. Not hate ugly, okay? I've accepted the fact that I am just the third best in my family. Because at that time, my older sister was like, you know, very popular in school, very popular in the village, et cetera. So I never thought of myself as such.

I thought that I'm the ugly duckling and I didn't hate it per se as a teenager. It's just I didn't understand where to put myself. But luckily that was in the 90s. So there's no social media for me to compare myself with and influence that I may be ugly and terrible and nobody would ever, ever

be my friend or would ever pay attention to me. So I got lucky. think I got away with accepting that maybe I'm unattractive, scot-free during my teenage years. What's beautiful about self-discovery in terms of building your personality and how you manage to have self-respect or self-love, it's

It's really a journey. You can't just have that. You earn that for yourself too. And you accept little by little in your life as you get older and you get more experience where you're at. For example, I hated my ears because when I was growing up, I've got the biggest ears out of my cousins and sisters. And everybody calls me all of my cousin. could remember they call me Dumbo.

You know the elephant from the cartoon. There's a tiny, cute, sad elephant named Dumbo. And that was my name, my nickname. Everyone who would hear this story would say, my gosh, that's so harsh. Everybody treated you so badly. But I think we're kids. Kids say the darnest things. And it never attached to me to become insecure about.

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (14:31.01)
them calling me Dumbo negatively, but in terms of my developmental phases of teenage years, knowing that I've got big ears, I tend to keep it because the impression was it's an ugly thing to show and it's shameful. Maybe I, if you can hear, I'm not really regretful or bitter about it.

But for me, I'm taking it as a perspective because it was also a journey for me to understand my ears. So I kept on hiding it in high school. I remember this very clearly. I always hide it or when I do a ponytail, I make sure that the hair on the side would kind of embrace the ears back, if you know what I mean. And you know, when I got older, when I started working,

I'm beginning to develop my sexuality, that I had it going, and I saw myself differently. Focusing on the ears, I was like, I fucking love my ears, who fucking cares? So I started like not caring anymore, and now it's just a normal thing. Will I ever, ever, ever change it? Hell no. Even if I get offered to change my ears, I would not even do that.

because it's part of me. Another thing that everybody in Asia seems to erase is having freckles. I naturally have freckles since I was a kid. So it's just part of the genetics that I build up that I have. When I go have makeup sessions, when there is like an event, I don't go to makeup artists anymore or I instruct them very, very...

specifically to say don't ever cover my freckles because whenever you will cover my freckles it would not be me. I just think that every single factor, every single element in my face were made for me from my parents and from my ancestry. Of course there will be a lot of people that would be what about ism here and there. Yeah, fix whatever you want it to fix but you don't need

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (16:53.462)
I think, okay, okay, this is the succinct thing that I will say about this further. What I'm saying here is that if you think you're going to fix something in your face or in your body, you fix it according to your proportions that you want. Do not say, wanted that ex-Hollywood person's eye or their butt or the same shape

as another ex-actress out there. Do not do that because that's not for you. That's not tailor-fit for you. So if you want to correct something, for you to feel better or for you to fix something, work with a professional that will do it according to your proportions.

Because I'm not here to say, stop this, stop that. No, it's your life. It's none of my business. What I'm just saying is that the word beauty and the way it's skewed on media nowadays, it's quite going the wrong direction. There are lots of repercussions about looking the same and also like aging fast because everybody

feels that they're snatched or everybody's having more dysmorphia, etc. We can't go on like this. It's sad. And you know what I'm interested at? Probably in 5 to 10 years, we will see the aftermath and the effects of what everybody's doing to their faces now. We will just find out what's going to happen to them. Of course, I wish everyone the best, but also some people would need

karma because they're harming other people by harming themselves. At the end of the day, we have to be grounded. We have to know what's more important. Beauty should still exude from within, not just your internet face. These people who would give you likes are strangers. They're not there to really love you as a person. I hope you get something from this one.

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (19:14.07)
For you, how do you see beauty? Have you been experiencing a phase of insecurity or are confident with your perception of beauty's real meaning? Please share it with me and I hope that you subscribe, comment, and also share my podcast. Your support would be very beautiful in my eyes. By the way, you are beautiful and you know it. You just need to own that.

with conviction. Until next time, ciao!

Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (19:57.176)
Human Thesaurus Podcast is produced by me and Jeremiah Ronquillo. All rights reserved via Wishblizz Media.