Learning to Redefine Beauty Beyond “Being Pretty” or a Physical Aesthetic Has Been My Regenerative Power by India Ame’ye
Beauty Is Not Always Pretty: A Reclamation of Wellness and Feminine Power
Beauty, for me, is not always synonymous with what is considered “pretty.” It is not smooth, poreless skin. It is not a perfectly contoured face, an hourglass figure, or an aesthetic curated through the lens of patriarchal ideals. Real beauty—regenerative beauty—is raw, intuitive, and fiercely practical. It is the presence of tools, both tangible and ancestral, that sustain us in moments of loss, heartbreak, imbalance, and fatigue. I’ve come to understand that even on my hardest days, or when I’m rocking my baggy jeans and feeling unsteady, I’m still transmitting a beauty frequency into the world. Only because beauty is far more than appearance.
It is energy first and foremost
My understanding of beauty is now mostly rooted in legacy. It is the quiet knowledge passed through generations that allows one to serve as a medicine woman for oneself, one’s family, one’s lover or lovers, and one’s community. It is not adorned in polished perfection but rather consciously clothed in wisdom, resilience, and a reverence for life’s cycles and seasons. It is the feminine in its most sacred form.
With age and real maturity, a woman begins to realize that beauty is not measured in glass skin or in a suffocating silhouette sculpted by waist trainers that restrict breath, circulation, and blood flow. It resides in the feminine— in the regenerative, responsive, widened, and receptive intelligence of any human body. It’s in the trust I place in natural medicine, in ancestral knowledge, and yes—only when absolutely necessary—in western science and western medicine, all integrated in ways that align with truth.
This is the way of the Ancient Woman, and her legacy lives on in me. I am magnetic, mainly because my beauty is reminiscent of my paternal Southern grandmother Louise who I heard used to sit with wide legs in a rocking chair on the front porch with the hem of her dress pulled up sky-high, her meaty, dark-skinned thighs visibly exposed. She would be sipping homemade lemonade out of a mason glass jar with an illegal, unregistered shotgun perched up behind her front door, not as an act of violence and aggression, but as a symbol of feminine protection, presence, and of course, beauty. Oh my love, you didn’t know that the feminine leads and has a deeply protective quality, the most spiritual but deeply cut-throat when needed? Well, beloved please continue to read my work if you want to grow your vitality and I will prove it to you overtime.. Many of the women in my female line have often lived in divine union with both their feminine and masculine energies with sexualities that were fluid, complex, and mysterious. I am just like them.
Like my foremothers, I know that there is nothing soft or delicate about beauty, particularly in its healing or recalibration and regeneration, phases. It is raw. Unforgiving. Complex. Yet it is still beauty. Too often with beauty, we glorify only the upward journey—the joy, the lightness, the radiant glow of health which are parts of beauty but not the whole story. Because true beauty is a journey that also includes the grief, the exhaustion, the sadness, the loneliness, and the constipation.
To honor the full spectrum is to witness the entire creative process of beauty and forever be transformed. Because true beauty does not skip the parts that hurt or look a hot fucking mess. True beauty is found in the freedom to be unfiltered and look unwell, passionate, or ridiculous.. It exists in the wildness of uncombed hair and other messy moments—skin rashes, adult acne, and heartbreak. These are not signs of neglect, but rather evidence of life being lived authentically human and beautiful.
When I choose to express how I feel through dress, voice/singing/moaning, rest, or resistance, that, too, is beauty. Because true beauty is not just a body that others desire. It is a lineage that others remember. It is the healing woven into our DNA, carried forward from ancestral mothers whose work we now continue. Even when my body feels fatigued, my blood and bones remember its purpose, that’s why.
As a Black woman living outside the United States for over 10 years, a filthy nation whose systems have long been structured to erase people who look like me, my truth is inseparable from survival, root chakra base, big ass bottom energy. I will not cover the pain like I will not hide my hips. I will not sanitize heartache and anger like I will not hide my shimmies and bouncing breasts in bra contraptions. Black and brown women —actually all women, our White sisters included, are in the midst of a health crisis, and we are doing the best we can NOT to lose hope under the density. I wrote this so that we can be reminded to not give up on our innate regenerative natural beauty as we move through the ugly and the painful. Because the fragments of suppressed fury buried at the back of our throats, knees, psoas, jaw, neck, cervix, breasts, uterus, and tailbone, are beautiful in their own right. Sense beauty everywhere, in all things, Ma.
The intensity behind our eyes, the sharpness of our intuition, the pain in our vaginal portal, and the quiet readiness to stand up and defend what we love are expressions of beauty. This is not the beauty of shallow breathing, performative healing, or tamed, digestible empowerment.
This is raw beauty found in truth, as generational strength and survival, as sacred rage directed at systems of oppression that cause us to devote to shaking our tiddies, massaging our vulva mound, and stretching to unwind the gunk of epigenetic harm that lives in our female body daily . This is the beauty found in prayer over a pot of boiling water and herbs steeped with intention and song. It is in the laying on of hands when words won’t simply do.
There is a kind of beauty that awakens when we hit rock bottom and decide keep going anyway. A dangerous beauty that frightens the world because its energy cannot be controlled or repressed anymore and lives antithetical to oppressive systems. It is the kind of beauty that relaxes the nervous system with anointed hands that also sculpt and tone the face. They move lifetimes of old stuck energy and tell our body that it is okay to exhale. When we touch the face of our loved ones, we are listening for the tension and the dense emotion being held in their neck, shoulders, and jaw for too long. It is the kind of beauty that knows that our sensitivity is our superpower and our intuition was meant to guide us, guide others, and guide and recalibrate the world. It is the kind of beauty that grows patience and stillness that birth a new earth vision and not the same old foolishness. It is the kind of visions that build legacies. This tue beauty resurrects new systems. It calls forth an era of reclamation and liberation. It is beauty that walks the halls of timelines, gathering ancestral memory as a creative force. It is radical. It is revolutionary.
To define beauty for oneself is an act of wellness. To honor beauty as the raw, the real, and the untamed is not simply an aesthetic. it is a practice of sovereignty.
So yeah, beauty is not always a pretty aesthetic. It is, however, always mysterious and shows up differently every cycle or season. And with that, it is always powerful. The dominant beauty industry is dehydrating—literally and spiritually, in contrasts to the kind of beauty that makes a woman “naturally wet,” lush with life, desire, and spiritual vitality. Current beauty trends foster a visceral connection between repression and libido, between self-denial and disconnection from feminine energy.
But in honoring the truth of beauty, all resistance falls away and we naturally become even more physically attractive, radiant, and beautiful as a result. This kind of beauty makes us gushy gush, forever naturally wet for all the days of our life. The other kind of beauty that most women fall for is so restrictive and dehydrating, all that time spent beating the face in the mirror with toxins and chemicals, can shrink female libido overtime, especially as she gets older. It’s all connected.
—India Ame’ye, Author, Italy
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