There is a lot to be said for how many subcultures, aesthetics, and artistic movements never really interrogate their consistent obsession with paleness as the pinnacle of beauty.
Beauty. Purity. Elegance. Divinity. Sophistication. Innocence. Transcendence. Apotheosis, so to speak.
There are entire visual languages built around the idea that the paler something becomes, the closer it is to perfection. And I think people are often deeply reluctant to acknowledge how entangled that is with race.
Not because I think every individual artist who enjoys pale aesthetics is secretly overtly racist. That would be absurd.
I just mean that aesthetics do not exist in a vacuum. Symbolism does not exist in a vacuum. Beauty standards do not exist in a vacuum.
We inherit all of these things.
If I ask someone to imagine an angel, a pristine palace, an untouched paradise, or the embodiment of purity itself, there is a very good chance the image that appears in their head is overwhelmingly pale.
White marble. White robes. White flowers. White light. White feathers. Pale skin.
Even outside of explicitly religious imagery, you see it constantly. The most "ethereal" fantasy races are pale. Delicateness is represented through porcelain skin. Nobility through untouched complexions. The less saturated, the less earthy, the less connected to the physical world something becomes, the closer many seem to imagine it is to perfection.
Those visual associations did not spontaneously emerge from the human psyche. They were developed, reinforced, and passed down through cultures that also happened to spend centuries constructing racial hierarchies around whiteness.
Which does not mean every use of white or paleness in art or Aesthetique is racist. It does mean that "whiteness equals purity" and "darkness equals corruption" are not culturally neutral ideas.
They are, again, inherited ones.
I think a lot of artists are perfectly happy to discuss symbolism, cultural context, historical influences, visual language, and artistic intent until someone points out that maybe the persistent elevation of paleness itself is also part of that conversation.
Then suddenly it's treated as though you're reading too much into it.
If we can recognize that crowns symbolize authority, halos symbolize sanctity, and red symbolizes passion or violence, then I don't think it's unreasonable to ask why so many artistic and aesthetic traditions consistently reserve pale bodies, pale materials, and pale palettes for the highest ideals of humanity while darkness is so often left to represent danger, savagery, impurity, moral failure, or the unknown.
You do not have to conclude that every artist participating in those traditions is consciously reproducing racism. I certainly don't.
But I do think artists have a responsibility to occasionally interrogate the visual language they inherit instead of treating it like an immutable law of aesthetics.
Because the things we instinctively find beautiful are very often actually just things we have been taught to find beautiful.
And to continue off of that train of thought, I think one of the places this becomes immediately & extremely obvious is aesthetic subcultures.
Aesthetic communities often like to imagine themselves as existing outside of politics. Outside of history. Outside of culture. They're "just vibes."
Except no form of self expression is ever really just vibes, because self expression is in and of itself a sort of Little Art.
Take almost any aesthetic that places a heavy emphasis on softness, serenity, elegance, refinement, purity, or "etherealness," and you'll notice a pattern emerge remarkably quickly.
The moodboards become increasingly desaturated. The fabrics become increasingly white. The architecture becomes marble. The flowers become lilies or white roses or daisies. The light becomes diffuse. The people become pale...
...Sometimes extremely pale.
Not because anyone sat down and decided "this aesthetic is only for white people!!!" But because, over time, the visual shorthand for "beautiful" quietly converges on features historically associated with whiteness.
You see it in angelcore. You see it in light AND dark academia. You see it in coquette. You see it in fairy aesthetics.
Even communities that are consciously trying to reject mainstream beauty standards often end up quietly reproducing one of the oldest ones.
Goth spaces, for an off the cuff easy example since I was recently doing some reading and research on Tim Burton so it happens to be on my mind, have spent decades pushing back against conventional ideas of attractiveness, and yet you'll still routinely see "corpse pale" treated as the ideal. Looking dead is desirable, but looking white in particular is most desirable. The makeup itself often revolves around erasing warmth and pigment from the face before building the rest of the look back up.
The same thing happens in fantasy spaces.
People will claim to reject 'modern' beauty standards entirely in favor of elves, fae, angels, ghosts, dolls, vampires, and otherworldly beings, and yet somehow, by sheer coincidence I'm sure, those beings are still overwhelmingly depicted as pale.
Why do we reject Hollywood only to inherit Renaissance paintings?
Even "nature" aesthetics constantly just do this. Cottagecore, and similar spaces are ostensibly about reconnecting with the natural world and a simpler, kinder way of being, but the visual language often centers pale skin framed by wheat fields, white linen, white lace, white daisies, white baby's breath, pale soft morning light, and washed-out color palettes. Nature itself is infinitely varied, but for some strange reason, the idealized human body within that nature is remarkably consistent.
The sad part is that many of these communities are genuinely full of lovely people who would never consciously argue that white people are more beautiful.
And yet if you scroll through enough moodboards, enough #aesthetic blogs, enough Pinterest collections, enough edits, enough aesthetic photography, a pattern starts emerging that is very uncomfortable and difficult to ignore if you're BIPOC
It's that paleness itself seems to be functioning as the aesthetic object (not to b confused with my constant use of the word 'Art Object' /hj).
The skin becomes another white surface alongside the marble, the lace, the porcelain, the swan, the dove, the cathedral, the snowfall.
And because of that, people with darker skin often end up feeling like they have to work against the aesthetic rather than simply existing within it.
It's the cumulative effect of thousands of people all drawing from the same inherited visual language without ever asking where that language came from.
I am politely requesting people to ask why those things have become so tightly bound to our ideas of beauty, purity, sophistication, and transcendence in the first place, and why so many aesthetic spaces continue to reproduce those associations almost automatically.
Aesthetics are never "just aesthetics."
They are collections of symbols.
And symbols come from somewhere.
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