Pretty? Really? You could be ambitious, you could be intelligent. You could be fearless, strong, kind, outspoken. Radiant, a fire even in stark daylight; confident, a gale to usurp the winds. You could set a new world loose with the powers you unfurl, and twirl lives ‘round a finger left un-dainty and undone.

You could want to be anything in the world, and you want to be pretty?

I do too. By the glint of the mirror that caught me glancing around and the comb which exhausts to satisfaction every strand on my head – I have ducked a truth that I wish I did not know. I want to be seen.

Why? Because a tale of a sleeping princess billowing in beauty taught me from when I was young that she who is pretty will have the prince. Why? By natural selection, isn’t it for those bestowed with the most favorable visage, will the crowds part a way to the top? Why? Society, it crooned, “Beauty is more than skin deep,” always averting its gaze a little when I did not look my best.

To me, in many a way, “prettiness” remains the age-old constraint of society on human progress.

But did you know, this year, that after 13.8 billion years of its inception, physicists have struck upon a new hypothesis of Einsteinian singularity daring us closer than ever before to the very birth of the universe? Scientists at Harvard Medical School and the Scripps Institute are on the verge of curing AIDS after years of the dying and unflagging experiments. We have come so far.

A girl was shot in the head by the Taliban at 15 years of age for almost single-handedly trying to swerve the inviolable right of education back to every girl from whom it was seized. She won the Nobel Prize at the age of 17 last year. “Pretty” would have shot her dreams at point blank.

We have plucked from impenetrable cosmos the unknown by the bare tissue in our heads and wringed entire galaxies to reap the most imperceptible enigmas of all time, but back on Earth, we are still busy being pretty. We have come so far, and yet we are so far behind.

The mirror is just a strike to our deepest superficiality – the human sense of being attractive. I am being purposeless in my argument, it does seem, criticizing – an irrefutable care for the arrangement of our flesh, skin and exterior cells. But that is not what I am saying, that we should not tend to our looks – what I am saying is that you and I can be so much more.

Half of our female lives are choked upon shelves, rows bedecked in hairbrush, self-consciousness, eyeliner, “How do I look?”, unsatisfactory reflection, “Nice dress”, judgement in eyes and not mind. Being attractive and presentable is such a human thing, and such a pivotal necessity to people.

There is really nothing “wrong” with it, the part of being a person that even a billion years of advancement will probably not change. The problem with it, though, is that everything we do to ‘look good’ simply objectifies us just to please others, and in turn, ourselves.

But, to the teenager busy fixing up her face – when you have grown up and your little girl is old enough to inch up to her own reflection and flounce at being an adult, do not tell her she looks “pretty.”

Tell her she is more than just the word that reduces every laudable characteristic we have to a capacity that is not even an ability of our own doing. Tell her that the marring pink scribbles on the wall are imaginative, and her slipping counting, clever. Say to her, that with the pretty white bow atop her tiny curls, “You are more than ‘pretty’ could ever be.”  

It is like “pretty” is a criterion that some of us have fulfilled on everyone else’s volition. I am frustrated and silently exasperated to no end whenever a feminine name is brought up in conversation, and the first thing, not her achievements or successes or ambitions or even her first period teacher, that is asked is, “Is she pretty?” I have heard this question and I have felt every atom of credulity in human principles that was poised a second ago reel down below with me.

And that is it exactly. It is not even my feminist side that is invoked every time I hear someone being judged for their unintended exterior. I will not be too dramatic, it is not my faith in humanity either, but it certainly is a faith that we are all going somewhere, and that faith rests on the belief that at least today, somewhere is a place ahead of us.

Here is one of the transpirations that should, perhaps, explain why I believe that in some ways we are yet ready to tread the advancements of our own century. I heard a boy’s comment sitting passively on a bus a month or two ago, and what he said, I will refine to a less crass rendition, “Attractive girls have the right to be mean.”

There again, checked in a box is “pretty,” the almighty unassailable qualification. Somewhere, out of all of our progress to the moon, quantum mechanics and beyond, we rocketed back, declaring the involuntary features only our genetics have anything to do with, as one of our greatest achievements.

It is, of course, more than the slightest bit hard not to concentrate on striving to be more attractive, with everything that we are exposed to. We have whole industries and careers dedicated to the refinement of our flawed exteriors. There are models, the beautiful that no one can attain the standards of, and then there are the decked shelves of fashion retails which contain, in exorbitant prices and expectations – the crux of why any girl has to ever be self-conscious.

But we can get past this, and rise above our own selves. Because above all? We have the ability to be girls – no, people – unharnessed by the restrictions of “pretty.” Look good, but when the mirror catches your flitting eyes, let it catch you being something different.

Let it catch you being ambitious, kind, confident, radiant, fearless, strong – and more than “pretty” will ever be.