Isn't It Enough to Be Beautiful?

Some thoughts on beauty, shame, and why I stopped trying to explain the magic.

For over a decade I have done my best to educate people about crystals, the therapies around them, and how to work with them for sensual healing and exploration. There is a great mystical component I love, and a lot of pseudoscience I pontificate and postulate quite often. I have immersed myself in the marriage of sex and the tantric technology that is Chakrubs. I was in my early twenties when I started this brand, navigating my own relationship to sexuality, back when self love was just my euphemism for masturbation.

I love crystals. I meditate with them. I prefer them to any other kind of sex toy. But after years of explaining why crystals over silicone or plastic, of naming their metaphysical properties, I have, as I've matured, begun to place more emphasis on one of the shallower aspects. They are beautiful.

The Chakrubs come from the earth. They are nature, carved and polished without chemicals to reveal a shine, colors and configurations that still dazzle me. I send each one off with a sense of awe. Looking at these stones up close has not gotten old.

What has felt a little tired is having to explain something inexplicable. The magic, the energy, the frequency. I am not trying to convince a skeptic, and I have spent too long thinking about how to position myself so no one can call me a charlatan for saying that this product, which is really more of a practice, can change people for the better.

So I have been sitting with beauty instead. With my own relationship to the word, and with why I feel I have to advocate for any other aspect of this object at all. Why do we need anything more? Why have we become so instrumentalist that we cannot let a thing exist simply, without it having to function for some complicated reason?

We are maxxing everything now. Looksmaxxing the face, optimizing the body, hacking the sleep. And while we sharpen ourselves, we let the world around us go ugly. I become enraged when I see new buildings go up in my historic little Detroit neighborhood with no care for beauty in their design. Beauty stripped from the simplest things, like benches. The color drained out of our cars. It enrages me.

We treat beauty as an add-on. An extra. A lesser priority. But if we have to, we can see that beauty has a function, even if it is not quantifiable. Look at the function of beauty in a sex toy, and maybe we understand a little more about how it works everywhere else.

Sex toy design, no matter how sophisticated or elegant, is never truly beautiful, in my opinion. Whether blown glass or medical grade silicone, sleek black with a chrome handle, it is still something most people hide away in a nightstand after use. I doubt many people would hold their sex objects to their chest, or stare at them, study the design, feel connected to them the way people who work with Chakrubs do.

That admiration transforms how a person experiences the act, simply by removing the need to hide it away. Because it is beautiful. Because it is earth made. Because it is unique. The beauty itself becomes the function. The function to release shame. The function to encourage a person to spend time with themselves, to explore their sexuality, to contemplate where they come from.

Without the metaphysical properties, the beauty itself has become, to me, its most poignant function. And because I see Chakrubs as a symbol of how I treat myself, I have begun to ask a harder question. If this object is worthy simply because it is so beautiful, maybe I don't have to convince anyone of crystal healing. Maybe I can just let it be a beautiful object. And where else am I doing that? As someone who clearly over-intellectualizes, I have begun to wonder if I do it to myself. How many times am I trying to prove to the people around me that I am worthy by showcasing this or that part of who I am.

Beauty is erotic. It is different from pretty. It has presence. It is deeper than skin deep. It has history. It holds something. It is not shallow, it has depth, and still it does not ask to be explained.

So isn't it enough to move through the world the way beauty does? Can people feel me energetically?