In an age where beauty has been reduced to the chimeras of fashion, the task of retrieving its significance is not a trivial pursuit. If Indian women have succeeded in conquering the ‘universe’, the ‘world’, and ‘Asia-Pacific’ in recent beauty pageants, it is not because they have become beautiful overnight; rather, their beauty is now being fashioned in ways that are amenable to the cosmetic and sartorial trends of the global market.

While the economic and sociological contexts of such pageants cannot
be separated from the seductive lure of globalisation, it would be crude to equate the idea of beauty with its commodification by marketing forces. There are other marginalised dimensions of beauty that need to be retrieved, and activated, beyond the hype of the beauty industry. For a start, it could be argued that beauty is not just what meets the eye. It can relate to inner and to unknown states of being.