Is It a Compliment to Be Called “Beauty with Brains”?
Written by Nadine Aisyah Putri Maharani & Adam Ismail Budiman
Edited by Ni Putu Eka Pujagita & Maya Lestari
The Beauty with Brains Debacle
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”, many of us grew up with stories and songs that quietly taught us a woman’s worth is measured by her beauty. Lana Del Rey once asked in her lyrics, “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”, a question that hints at the fear that love and recognition only lasts as long as beauty does.
So when someone is complimented as “beauty with brains,” it sounds less like a compliment and more like an exception being made.
This raises the question: why isn’t there a phrase like “handsome with brains”? Is it because intelligence is treated as the default value for men? Whereas for women, it has to be proven first or even sometimes takes twice the effort?
The phrase “beauty with brains” implies that beauty and intelligence are two separate traits that usually can’t coexist in most women, making anyone who possesses both seem outstanding. It also implies the reverse: that intelligent women are usually assumed to fall short of beauty standards.
Both assumptions carry the same negative connotation about how women are perceived in society; that a woman’s beauty holds more weight than anything else she has to offer. It’s a belief so deeply rooted that it shows up everywhere, from the stories we grew up with to the way we talk about accomplished women today.
That said, it’s worth acknowledging that there’s also debate over whether this phrase is always negative. In some contexts, it may simply be plainly stating that someone possesses both beauty and intelligence, without any intent to demean. Still, what we want to unpack here is the misogynistic roots behind the phrase, and how those roots persist even in its seemingly most neutral uses.
But this raises a bigger question: is there an underlying reason why beauty and intelligence keep getting pitted against each other in the first place?
One heuristic that may explain it is the “what is beautiful is good” effect, or what we might know as the Halo Effect. It is the idea that people automatically associate attractive faces with other positive traits, including competence. If that’s true, attractive women should be assumed to be intelligent, not the opposite. So why does the “beauty with brains” phrase, and the assumption behind it, still persist?
One of the most famous examples that sits in this contradiction is the dumb blonde archetype.
(Elle Woods from Legally Blonde)
Being blonde has long been considered part of Eurocentric beauty standards, where to be blonde was to be beautiful. Interestingly, the notion that blonde women are inherently dumber is a widespread belief, directly going against the halo effect we just described. But is this belief even true?
Zagorsky (2016) analyzed the IQ of Americans with different hair colors and found that women with blonde hair did not have it any lower. The study actually found that (which could be due to socioeconomic systems that favor attractive white people), blonde women had slightly higher IQ scores.
The “dumb blonde” archetype is direct proof that most people don’t believe women can be both beautiful and intelligent. Now, if you can’t have both, which one do you have to have?
History already has an answer, and it’s been embedded in the stories and folklore we grew up with long before any modern research existed.
How Beauty has Always Been Portrayed by Society as a Woman’s Primary Value
In fact, you can’t choose. In a way, it seems like women are forced to be beautiful, and therefore, perceived as dumb. This idea has been quietly reinforced and ingrained in many women for centuries through folklore.
Take Nyi Roro Kidul as an example. Dated as far back as the 1400s or 1500s, her tale reflects the overall societal view of women vividly. The name “Roro” means beauty, signifying her seemingly most important trait, therefore highlighted as such. All her other qualities, like being fair, intelligent, and a great leader come second to her physical appearance. This is certainly intriguing since Nyi Roro Kidul was the Queen of the Southern Seas, something that wouldn’t typically demand any sort of beauty. And yet, in the legend, she was overtaken by a curse which made her skin turn red, bumpy, and scabbed. Because of this curse which made her, by society’s standards, unattractive… She loses all her people and even gets hunted down in some interpretations. Only when she regains her beauty by breaking the curse, she is allowed to get her happy ending.
Her story as a whole completely revolves around her “Roro”, the thing she needs to sustain to be worthy of dignity.
On the other hand, Batara Kala is the God of time and death in Balinese-Javanese culture. He’s considered to be essential to the balance of the universe, as his destructive nature is important in its own way. Although ways of death and destruction still make him out to be the antagonist in most stories, it’s not in the same way Nyi Roro Kidul was made out to be.
Nyi Roro Kidul became the wrong person when she lost something she couldn’t control, her beauty. Batara Kala was criticized for his actions, which he had control over.
Many of these stories, films, and songs are subliminally teaching women and girls the same things. First of all, it shows that no matter how smart you are, no matter how great you are at leading, no matter how fair you are, if you are an unattractive woman, none of that matters. Second of all, it teaches women that being ugly is a crime since you lose your right to life or dignity… Lastly, even women in power or high social status aren’t immune to judgement based on their appearance – almost like that’s just the consequence of existing as a woman. There’s no way out.
(Fiona Apple through SPIN Magazine’s Interview)
How Beauty has Always Been Portrayed by Society as a Woman’s Primary Value
Remember the “what is beautiful is good” heuristic we mentioned earlier, the assumption that attractive people are automatically seen as more competent? Research on its real-world consequences tells a very different story.
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But why does beauty, something automatically linked to positive traits, turn into a liability the moment it enters professional or creative spaces? Role Congruity Theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002) offers an explanation. Society tends to associate women with “communal” traits: warmth, gentleness, approachability, while associating positions of power and leadership with “agentic” traits: assertiveness, dominance, competence. Prejudice toward women in these spaces doesn’t come from the content of the stereotype itself, but from the perceived mismatch between it and what the role demands. Beauty, often read as a marker of femininity, reinforces that “communal” coding, making beautiful women appear even less “fit” for roles that call for agentic traits, regardless of their actual competence.
Heilman and Saruwatari (1979) found the opposite happening in professional settings, an effect known as “beauty is beastly,” or the Lack of Fit Model. Attractive women applying for managerial positions were rated less qualified than less attractive women, simply because they were seen as not fitting the traits the role demanded. Meanwhile, attractiveness in men rarely worked against them in the same way.
This same pattern shows up far beyond office settings. Take the music industry, where the concept of authorship and creativity has long been gendered as inherently masculine (Taylor-Jay, 2009). Research from Columbia, INSEAD, UC Irvine, and Northwestern found that for the same level of performance, women receive more negative evaluations than men, and have to outperform them just to be seen as equally competent. As Taylor Swift once put it, “female artists have to reinvent themselves 20 times more than male artists, or else you’re out of a job.”
Billie Eilish is a clear example of this. She’s credited as co-writer on nearly all of her songs alongside her brother Finneas, one of the highest writing credit rates among artists of her generation, yet public speculation about how much she actually contributes keeps resurfacing. Compare that to Drake, who was publicly accused of using a ghostwriter back in 2015 during his feud with Meek Mill. The accusation was treated as a battle he could win and settle once and for all, and once he did, his authorship was rarely questioned again. Billie doesn’t get that same closure.
The doubt just keeps returning, no matter how much proof exists.
The Paradox
Women’s beauty can never be placed in a neutral position. The “what is beautiful is good” heuristic reveals a contradictory expectation society has created out of beauty itself: on one hand, it’s automatically linked to good traits, yet pop culture keeps producing stereotypes suggesting that beauty and intelligence are rare to coexist, as seen clearly in the “dumb blonde” myth despite it being long debunked.
This contradiction carries into professional spaces too, where the Lack of Fit Model shows that beauty, once a social advantage, turns into a source of suspicion the moment women enter spaces considered serious or powerful. The same pattern repeats itself in creative industries, where women like Billie Eilish have their competence endlessly questioned despite clear evidence, while men like Drake are given room to “prove it once” and be done with it. Either way, women have to prove themselves harder and more often than men do. “Beauty with brains” is just one of the smaller symptoms of this much larger, misogynistic paradox.
Deconstructing and Reclaiming the Concept of Beauty: Self Expression vs. Subjecting into Patriarchal Standards
Then, how should we view beauty, as a trait that women have?
To be clear, finding beauty appealing isn’t inherently wrong. There’s truth to the idea that humans are, on some level, biologically drawn to attractive faces and features. But attraction is just one small part of what makes someone worth loving, or worth taking seriously. Every human being deserves to be valued and loved equally, not judged against a set of criteria that, more often than not, fades with time.
Lana Del Rey herself seemed to arrive at this same realization. Six years after asking “will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful,” she wrote in “Old Money”: “Will you still love me when I shine from words but not from beauty?” Unlike her earlier lyrics, she doesn’t use words like “when I’m no longer” or “despite”, as if her fading beauty doesn’t make her any less deserving of love.
It’s almost as if Lana isn’t the only one who’s started realizing this. Society’s demands for films have slowly begun to shift too. Disney has recently focused on female characters with much more depth, in stories that no longer center around physical appearance. Turning Red and Moana are two clear examples, where both girls face exciting journeys and different problems they have to overcome by learning from their mistakes, being intelligent, and having empathy. But the fact of the matter is, we still have a long way to go.
You don’t need to stop caring about how you look in order to not be perceived as incompetent – nor do you need to conform to the beauty standards in order to be validated by society – as doing either would just be appealing to one side of the same dichotomy.
Really, what we should be doing is asking ourselves, who are we doing this for? Who controls how women express their beauty?
Beauty is a paradox between empowerment vs. constraint. Women are demanded to follow this paradox which exposes the gross reality where individuals are forced to conform out of fear of being judged. On the other hand, beauty can also be. a form of self-expression which is an autonomous right and a way to exercise personal freedom, as long as it’s done without the sense of needing the approval of other people. Some women also feel a sense of happiness or pleasure from being able to do so, and whether or not they choose to, is the point. They should have the choice and the freedom to choose.
The real problem isn’t about whether or not women should care about their appearance, but rather who controls its meaning. Beauty as a self expression is valid because it’s not opposed to her intelligence, nor her competency. The problem comes when beauty is being enforced as something – a tool to redeem herself in a patriarchal society – that a woman should have in order to be accepted in society rather than a choice of expression.
So why don’t we start seeing things differently? Intelligence and beauty do not have to be seen as two mutually exclusive qualities, rather as two things that can coexist without needing to be first handed down. “Beauty with brains” can finally be reclaimed as a non misogynistic and genuine compliment when society stops treating it as a rarity/anomaly.
The good news is, we know we can turn things around. From the films we watch to the beliefs we uphold, we’re constantly making statements that affect the world, whether we realize it or not. We’re already seeing those exact choices make a difference, leading to real change.
So the next time you catch yourself measuring your worth, or someone else’s, by how well beauty and intelligence seem to “balance out,” pause for a second. Ask yourself where that standard came from, and who it was ever really serving. Reshaping how the world sees beauty starts with reshaping how we see ourselves, one compliment, one story, one belief at a time.
Referensi
Zagorsky, J. L. (2016). Are blondes really dumb? Economics Bulletin, 36(1), 401–410. https://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2016/Volume36/EB-16-V36-I1-P42.pdf
Heilman, M. E., & Saruwatari, L. R. (1979). When beauty is beastly: The effects of appearance and sex on evaluations of job applicants for managerial and nonmanagerial jobs. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 23(3), 360 – 372. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(79)90003-5
Taylor-Jay, C. (2009), dikutip dalam https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2021.2011932
