Japanese philosophy finds beauty in imperfection. It is now going viral thanks to social media as a resistance to increasingly recurring beauty standards.
Front teeth that are spaced apart from each other, a large mole on the face or a scar do not make us ugly. On the contrary, if we follow the Japanese philosophy of “wabi-sabi”.
Far from being a new buzzword, wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic concept that values imperfection, simplicity and the natural aging process.
It is curious that, in an era dominated by filters, “preventive” aesthetic surgeries, looksmaxxingand a constant pressure to look eternally young, Tiktok has made this philosophy that finds beauty in the marks of time typically assumed, wrongly, ugly.
On TikTok, an audio taken from the animated series King of the Hill went viral. In the excerpt, the character Bobby Hill observes a rose and comments: “I like mine because it’s a little scruffy. It has wabi-sabi.”
It is re-emerging as a form of resistance to the dangerous beauty standards that social media imposes on our lives. The phrase was appropriated by hundreds of thousands of users, who began to show what they previously saw as defects, healthily renamed as wabi-sabi.
With appropriation on social media, part of the subtlety of the original philosophy is inevitably lost. Wabi-sabi, in its origins, is linked to a broader view of life: accepts impermanence, values the natural wear and tear of objects and people, and sees beauty in everything that is incomplete, irregular and finite.
One from last year found a correlation between time spent online and the desire to resort to plastic surgery. Before a feed where many faces begin to look like copies of each other, wabi-sabi reminds us that difference, irregularity and “defect” can be precisely what makes us unique.
