We are a species frequently embarrassed by our emotions. We long to appear unbothered, casual, above it all. And so we learn to say things like “It’s not that deep,” especially in relation to appearance—our own, and others’.
The phrase is meant to liberate us from the burden of caring. It suggests that makeup is trivial, that beauty is mere decoration, that our fascination with faces—our own or others’—is best not examined too closely.
The rituals we perform in the name of beauty—however small or seemingly superficial—are never just about pigment or polish. They are about longing. They are about belonging. They are attempts, however modest, to shape how the world receives us—and how we receive ourselves.
A swipe of lipstick may indeed be playful. But it may also be the armor one wears before asking for a raise, or before leaving someone for good.
A foundation routine may be technical. But it may also be the way one softens the face they’ve been told is wrong, too old, too different, too masculine.
A mascara wand, wielded each morning, may seem insignificant—until one realizes it has become a kind of prayer: “Let me be seen. Let me be enough.”
Beauty is dismissed as shallow only by those who do not understand how deeply we ache to be known.
We are told not to care, but we do.
We are told not to try, but we try anyway.
We are told not to take it personally, but what is more personal than the face we show the world?
“It’s not that deep,” we say. But if it truly weren’t, we wouldn’t be so afraid to feel it.
So let us allow for the possibility that beauty is neither shallow nor embarrassingly profound, but something else entirely: A way of making peace with the self, and occasionally, with the mirror.
It may not be that deep. But it isn’t nothing either. And in a world that so often asks us to be surface-only, perhaps the quiet act of caring just enough is, in itself, a kind of depth.