What should be banished is not the concept of "perfection", but the perception that MY concept of "perfection" should be shared by everyone because it's universal.
It's fine if my wife, my stepson, and I are watching a TV series and an actress shows up and my wife goes with "She's beautiful", I go with "She's attractive" and my stepson says "I don't like her" (for example). It happened last night when Chaunteé Schuler Irving showed on screen.
We don't need to share the same tastes. But no one imposed their concept of beauty on anyone. We commented on it and that's it.
You say you're ugly. Who told you that? Someone who had their own concept of beauty. And that doesn't mean it's universal. But you believed it. Perhaps you share their concept, or they imposed their concept on you and you made it your own.
I love quotes (or pseudo-quotes) by people wiser than me, and about beauty, a lot of ink has been used (and wasted), so here are some of them:
"My mother always called me an ugly weed, so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles." (Hedy Lamarr) Does anyone think she was ugly? Perhaps you are in the same case.
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."
"The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express."
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."
"Things are beautiful if you love them."
"I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be."
And this one is what resumes my previous post:
"The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw."
