The case for beauty

Why beauty is not a luxury and why we shouldn't treat it like one

I am getting married in just over a month. After five years of engagement and two children, Jack and I will celebrate with over 100 of our closest friends and family in Ibiza. To say I am excited is an understatement.

I am not the girl who grew up fantasising about the big white wedding. But now that I’m planning it, I have to admit, I’m obsessed. I wouldn’t call myself a bridezilla exactly, but I would say that for the past two years a portion of my brain has been quietly reserved for all things wedding. And as we approach that final stretch, I’d estimate about 60% of my thinking is taken up with wedding planning: the logistics, the excitement, the conversations that begin with so, how’s it all going?

The wedding has colonised my mental real estate. Though as it turns out, that's the affordable part.

There’s a lot people say about weddings, but one thing is consistent: they are expensive. I’ve done everything I can to keep things reasonable. One of my best friends is making my dress, our celebrant is another friend, my parents are contributing generously, and the rest has been the result of digging into savings, cutting back, and an enormous amount of hustle. And we live in a culture that has thoughts about this. Why spend that much on a single day? That’s a car. That’s a deposit on a house. The implication being that to spend so much on something so fleeting is somehow irresponsible, even irrational.

But I have always been clear: for me, it’s worth it.

And this tension tells me something about modernity. It has become almost commonplace to see expenditure on ceremony as frivolous, a luxury you justify rather than a necessity you protect. Why spend on something transient and intangible when you could spend it on something you can touch, something you can use, something that holds its value?

This is a remarkably recent way of thinking. For most of human history, and still in many traditional communities today, ceremony was not the cherry on top of life. It was the structure of life. The Yoruba people of West Africa mark every significant transition, birth, coming of age, marriage, death, with elaborate ritual, not because they can afford the extravagance but because the ritual is the transition. Without the ceremony, the threshold has not truly been crossed. Similarly, in ancient Rome, the cost of a proper wedding, the sacrifices, the procession, the feast, was understood not as spending but as investing: in the protection of the gods, in the social fabric, in the luck of the union itself.

These ceremonies were the things around which a life was built. They marked the before and after. They gathered the community as witness and as blessing. They gave the new chapter, the marriage, the birth, the initiation, a solidity it would otherwise lack. You weren’t just having a wedding. You were making something real.

This is very much how I feel about ours. Yes, it is a brilliant excuse to gather everyone I love and have a party. But for me it is more than that. It is a rite of passage, the thing that will genuinely set us off on a good course for marriage. The wedding is not a decoration placed on top of the relationship we’ve already built. It is the ceremony that consecrates it. The foundation, not the flourish.

And of course you could have a profound rite of passage with a fire, some friends, and a few words spoken from the heart. It’s not the cost that makes it meaningful. But where we choose to spend, and where we dismiss spending as wasteful, often reveals what we actually value. When we dismiss ceremony as unnecessary, we are not being financially prudent. We are saying something about what we think makes life worth living.

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This got me thinking about beauty.

I love flowers. There are always fresh ones in our house, wild from the garden, picked on walks, sometimes, when I’m feeling really abundant, roses from a florist. Cut flowers are, by any utilitarian logic, a terrible purchase. They’re expensive. They die in a week. And yet.

For me they are the pinnacle of beauty. And I have come to think that being surrounded by beauty, really surrounded by it, as a daily choice, matters more than we currently allow ourselves to admit.

For twenty years I’ve run a values workshop in my corporate work, helping people identify what matters most to them. I’ve delivered it to well over 10,000 people by now. As part of the exploration I put a list of a hundred values on the screen, courage, integrity, faith, inclusion, adventure, and so on, and ask people to choose five. And here’s the thing I always notice, the thing that still surprises me even after all these years: in all that time, only one person has ever chosen beauty.

Just one.

I think this would have been different a hundred years ago. Go back further still and beauty was not a private preference but a moral category. For the ancient Greeks, the kalos k’agathos, the beautiful and the good, were barely distinguishable. Beauty in the world was evidence of order, of rightness, of the divine at work. A beautiful ceremony, a beautiful object, a beautiful life: these were not indulgences. They were aspirations worth organising a society around.

In modernity we have elevated the tangible over the ceremonial, the functional over the beautiful, the measurable over the meaningful. And with that, something quietly slips away, an attunement to the world, a sense that how things are done matters as much as whether they get done.

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Many of my friends are talking about the risks and rewards of using AI to do our writing. There are real gains - speed, clarity, structure. But what do we lose when we choose the concise, perfectly calibrated sentence that lands you at the destination instantly, instead of the long and wandering one that slips through fields and meanders between thoughts and doubles back on itself just to catch a particular quality of light before finally, almost reluctantly, arriving somewhere - like this one? We get there sure, but the journey was infinitely more boring.

For me, the capacity to create beauty - in language, in ceremony, in the way we choose to mark the moments of our lives, is one of the things that makes us human and makes the path of life worth walking.