A few days ago, someone asked me in an interview:
“What advice would you give your teenage self about beauty?”
I had to pause and think. Because when you’re fifteen, the idea of beauty is heavy—it feels like a mask you don’t quite know how to wear. So many of us spent years trying to hold that face in place, trying to please, trying to hide what made us different.
But if I could go back, I would tell myself this:
“A happy person is a beautiful person. And an ignorant person will never be happy.”
I’ve come to believe this with certainty—because it’s how I experience it.
Beauty isn’t skin. It isn’t youth. It isn’t the shape of your body or the price of your serum.
Beauty is a biological response. It’s how others feel when they’re near you.
And that energy only comes from learning, from growing, from connecting.
Beauty is built in moments.
It’s built when you open your heart and choose to listen instead of judge.
It’s built when someone trusts you with their pain or their truth, and you make them feel safe, like their words are protected with you.
That’s when your lips look more beautiful. That’s when your smile becomes unforgettable.
Beauty happens when you learn a new language and your jaw moves with curiosity, not tension.
It happens when you respect someone’s religion without trying to correct them—and suddenly, your eyes shine with something deeper than color.
It’s recognition.
It’s humanity.
It’s understanding.
Ignorance isn’t the absence of knowledge, it’s the decision to stay disconnected. To shut off the one thing that truly expands us: awareness.
We live in a time where beauty is sold in jars and filters.
But to me, beauty can’t be manufactured—it has to be built.
And the raw material… is knowledge.
Every time we learn something new, our brain literally changes.
New neural pathways form.
Empathy expands.
Curiosity lights up.
And that internal structure, the one no mirror shows, is the one people actually feel.
That’s the face that stays with them.
You can choose to stay the same.
You can choose not to grow.
But don’t expect to feel beautiful.
Because feeling beautiful has nothing to do with others seeing it—
It’s about feeling alive in your own skin.
So if you ask me today what beauty is, all I can say is:
It’s a place worth reaching.