Beasts of Beauty: Aerona’s Appearance

Alright, here we are. I knew this was a post I needed to write, but I’ve also struggled with finding the words. Ironic, huh? If you aren’t aware, this is part of my behind the scenes posts for Beasts of Beauty, so spoilers ahead if you haven’t read it yet.

Today I’m going to be talking about Aerona’s appearance. Which sort of feels like I’m holding a double-edged sword with no armor and I’ve never actually swung a sword before. So please be patient with me, and I’ll be getting a little personal as I delve into this topic fully.

Alright, first off, elephant in the room. I value transparency, so I’m going to be completely honest here.

Yes, the “Aerona” on the cover looks nothing like Aerona. A book cover’s job is to sell books. And the thing about book covers, especially online is they’re often in a thumbnail size, and if my cover designer had tried to actually make the model look as inhuman and rough as Aerona does, it wouldn’t have translated well to the book covers often are.

And as we see in all advertising, pretty people sell products. Makeup remover commercials pretty much always show a woman who still has a face of makeup supposedly after using the product. Women in shampoo commercials all have a full face of makeup despite the fact they’re supposedly in the shower. Human nature is to be attracted to products that subconsciously make us think we’ll be “beautiful” if we use them. The idea is that you’ll look like the person in the commercial if you use the product.

But the cover isn’t the book; it’s a tool to represent the book and encourage readers to buy. If it helps, think of the Aerona on the cover as an alternate version where she was never cursed and ended up looking like her mother.

Now onto the main topic.

Aerona’s appearance is a massive part of the story. The main reason I wanted to tell this story was because I wanted a story where a girl who is considered “ugly” by societal standards ended up with a guy who was “beautiful” by those same standards. Like I mentioned in a previous post, oftentimes women in media (or sometimes even in real life) call themselves ugly when they’re really just not supermodels. That doesn’t make them ugly.

But I didn’t want Aerona to be a plain girl or a girl who just wasn’t breathtakingly beautiful. I wanted a girl who genuinely looked… wrong. Like the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera or Shrek. Someone who people would stare at, not because they’re really trying to be mean or even trying to look, but the way people kind of can’t help but notice. It’s human nature to look at a car crash or look at a burning building. It’s not because all humans are enjoying seeing something terrible happen, we just can’t look away.

I wanted to see a girl who was almost inhuman levels of ugly get a happy ending with a handsome guy.

But I had a big problem.

What makes someone ugly? And how do we measure it? Is it just by what our society at our current time defines as ugly? Things that were considered beautiful or ideal in the past are easily considered ugly in the present. There are quite a few portraits of historical figures who were considered to be great beauties or extremely handsome that wouldn’t be considered the height of beauty if they lived in our day and age.

So I decided to lean into the aspect of Aerona looking wrong, for lack of a better word. Wrong in the sense her features didn’t quite fit human features anymore.

First off, I want to say my intention with Aerona’s appearance was never for anyone who might have a similar feature to feel ugly. Aerona’s features were chosen as a combination of things that are considered wrong, in that they don’t occur often or naturally in a healthy way and features that are considered ugly by general societal standards. And it’s not any one single feature of Aerona’s that makes her “ugly,” it’s the combination of them that take her to the state of not really looking human anymore.

For example, Aerona’s forehead is based off the protruding forehead of Neanderthals, not as dramatic, but certainly not one that occurs in humans. Aerona’s curved spine doesn’t make her ugly, but it does come as a side effect of her constant transformations doing damage to her, and the same applies to her bowlegged stance. Having scars doesn’t make her ugly, but all of them are a side effect of the transformations. The visible effects of what she’s gone through for the vast majority of her life mark her as being not quite human, and Aerona’s perception of herself as being not human feeds into that. She focuses on how her features don’t line up that she doesn’t see the ways in which she does.

And even if you read Aerona’s descriptions and felt you looked like that, trust me, chances are very high you don’t, and even if you did, I want this to be a story where that’s okay. If you feel like you look like Aerona, and feel ugly, that’s okay. You don’t have to feel beautiful all the time.

Because the point of Aerona’s “ugliness” or inhuman appearance was never something to be fixed.

Now there’s a movie I love, except for one part of it. So, spoilers for Penelope if you want to skip this paragraph. If you don’t know Penelope, it’s a modern fairytale-esque story where a girl is born with a pig’s nose because of a family curse, and the only way for the curse to break is for someone of her social status to love her. But in the end, the curse breaks when Penelope finally loves herself, because that was all it took. It didn’t have to be romantic love. And she gets a normal nose and lives happily ever after. But… I still found myself kind of disappointed because if she truly loved herself even with a pig’s nose, why couldn’t she still have a happy ending with the nose?

In the real world, with the exception of cosmetic surgery which is only a relatively recent thing, our “ugly” features don’t just get magically fixed to where we’re “beautiful” by societal standards when we love ourselves or fall in love. The “flaws” in our appearances don’t just fade away like magic. We still have to live with them every day.

And while I believe in finding beauty in ourselves regardless of societal standards and that everyone has beauty, in the day to day of living with ourselves, it’s not always that easy. We still pick out our flaws and try to cover them, and I can do a lot to make myself feel good about my appearance, but at the end of the day, I can’t change the fact I have small eyes and stretch marks. I have to find a way to live with it even on the days I can’t convince myself I’m beautiful. Because my physical flaws aren’t something I need to fix in order to find happiness. They’re just part of me.

So that’s why when the curse breaks, Aerona’s features don’t change much at all. Her features are part of what make her her. They’re not quite as dramatic, but she certainly doesn’t look “normal” or “beautiful.” Because Aerona doesn’t need to be beautiful by any standard to have to justify a happy ending with a handsome man.

Because if the whole point of the Beauty and the Beast story was about looking past appearances and falling in love with someone for who they were instead of what they looked like, Aerona doesn’t need to be pretty to be loved before her curse broke and after.

Aerona doesn’t need to be rewarded with beauty. Chasen is going to love her everyday anyway. And Aerona is always going to struggle with her appearance, because that’s life. That’s not something that can be fixed in a day or maybe even ever.

If there was a switch I could flip where I felt beautiful everyday, I’d flip it, but there’s not. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or confident someone is because there’s always going to be days where we just can’t see ourselves past our flaws. And that’s okay.

No one can look in a mirror and love what they see every day. My personal goal is for the days I love what I see to outnumber the days I don’t.

All Aerona can do is move forward and keep trying and maybe the next bad day won’t be as bad as the last.

That’s all I can do.

Aerona will always have to deal with people staring. She’s always going to hear people whisper about her face. And as she gets older and grows, it will bother her less and less, but it’s not an easy thing.

And not all problems are solved before we have to write “the end.” Some things take a lifetime. Aerona’s appearance isn’t a problem. But the personal struggle she has with her appearance isn’t one that can be solved in the span of a book.

I have a favorite personal quote, and it’s mostly about healing, but I think it works for most things. I think of it a lot when I get frustrated with where I am in life.

In short, a man was in an accident where there was an explosion and shrapnel entered his body, and the process of healing involved going in and removing one piece at a time as his body slowly pushed the pieces out. It was an agonizing process, and the patient said, “This is torture! How much longer is this going to take?”

And the doctor said, “It takes as long as it takes.”

Simple, maybe even a little obvious, but I heard the story and it just stuck. Every time I get frustrated and ask that question, I tell myself: It takes as long as it takes.

And I think that tends to show in my writing. Aerona’s relationship with Chasen being repaired, her relationship with herself, her nightmares and fears, her healing… It all takes as long as it takes.

Everything about Aerona’s appearance comes from the traumatic ordeal that she went through for ten years. Every deformity is a way her body rebuilt itself and screams “I survived.” And oftentimes that’s not beautiful by most standards, it’s harsh and painful and ugly, but I still want to ask, “Why can’t that be beautiful?”

So I wrote Aerona. Because I think we need more characters for us to find solace in on the days we don’t feel beautiful. Because we don’t have to earn beauty in order to find love or love ourselves and live our lives.

Because some days I feel more like the Beast than the Beauty, and I want other women and girls who feel that way to know they’re not alone.

Isn’t that what stories are for anyway?