You know those ads on TV or social media where someone is selling a cosmetic product?
A serum, a cream, some kind of face oil. A treatment that promises glow, firmness, radiance, repair and turning back time by 20 years.
Pay closer attention:
You see an influencer/model applying it to her face. She has perfect skin: no obvious spots, no wrinkles, no marks, no redness, no dullness. She looks “healthy, rested, fresh, clean, calm”.
So you see the product on her face and, without noticing it, you start believing the product is the reason her face looks like that.
But of course, that’s not necessarily what’s happening. Maybe she…
has very good genetics.
has aesthetic treatments.
has a dermatologist.
uses ten other products she’s not mentioning.
has professional lighting, filters, make-up, money, sleep, help, time, and a lifestyle that makes the whole thing easier.
Or maybe the product does help…
Still, you watch the video and feel: I want what she has.
Not the serum, really.
What she has.
Here’s the thing.
This doesn’t only happen with cosmetic products. It happens all the time with people’s lives.
You see someone who looks successful and you assume they’ve got something you don’t have, AKA money, resources, contacts.
You see someone who looks calm and rested and you assume their life must be easier.
You see a woman who seems serene in motherhood and you assume she’s not overwhelmed, not angry, not resentful, not exhausted, etc etc. But you don’t know what’s happening behind the image.
Maybe she has paid help, or she’s pretending, or she’s collapsing after the photo, or she’s having the same doubts you’re having, only she knows how to present herself in a pristine way, or maybe she’s genuinely doing well, but not for the reasons you’re inventing in your head.
Ha.
The trap.
Your mind sees the visible part and then completes the rest of the story.
In psychology, one version of this is called the halo effect:
One positive quality influences how we perceive the rest.
If someone looks beautiful, calm, successful, intelligent, desirable, or confident, we tend to attribute more things to them. We make them more complete in our imagination than they actually are in reality.
Sales uses this constantly.
The product borrows the qualities of the person selling it. In this example, the serum borrows her face. In the same way, a course borrows his lifestyle, a book borrows her success, an exercise routine borrows his body, relationship advice borrows their couple photo…
Notice this: you don’t only buy the thing, you buy the projection.
This is where it becomes dangerous for your own life, because you start measuring yourself against something you’ve partly invented in your mind. You’re not comparing your skin with her skin. You’re comparing your skin, your tiredness, your hormones, your money, your age, your face under horrible bathroom lighting, your actual life, with a very specific image designed to create desire.
And the same applies to any other area of life: success, relationships, motherhood, work, discipline, happiness, body, social life, purpose, everything.
You see the outside and you fill in the inside. Then, of course, you suffer because the inside you imagined for them looks better than the inside you actually live with yourself.
But that inside may not exist. It’s an illusiooooooooooooooon. Or it may exist in a completely different way.
That successful person may be anxious. That calm person may be medicated. That perfect mother may have a nanny, a cleaner and someone to walk the dog. That attractive couple may have been sexless for a year and a half. That woman with amazing skin may have spent thousands on treatments before she ever touched the serum she’s now selling you.
Who knows?
And even if none of that is true, even if their life is genuinely good, you still don’t have the whole explanation. You only have the surface.
So no, the solution is not to become bitter and assume everything is fake. The solution is to stop treating appearances as actual evidence.
Someone can look good and still be struggling. Or can seem ahead in their career and still be lost. Or can appear calm and still be full of conflict. Or can have something genuine and still not have the whole life you’re projecting onto them.
The thing is, of course you can admire something without using it to attack yourself.
You don’t need to stop looking at other people. You need to stop letting your projections run your self-worth, your decisions, and your sense of where you are in life.
If you want to stop using other people’s edited surfaces as a verdict on your own life, you could…
stop feeding your head with more pretty surfaces and start reading something that actually pulls the trick apart.
Every week, I send an email where I write about the psychological traps behind self-worth, relationships, decisions, comparison, and the unconscious patterns that keep people stuck.
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Love,
Noemi
