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and tied to the gods. The Maya worked on the teeth too. People filed their front teeth into points or notched edges and the wealthy drilled small holes into them and set in pieces of jade or other green stone so their teeth glittered when they spoke. It was painful, permanent and a clear sign of status. Then there was the head itself. In Maya culture and many others, families bound a baby's soft skull between two boards or wrapped it tightly for months, slowly shaping it into a long, sloping form. A high, elongated head marks someone as noble, and a person born with a round ordinary head simply did not have it. And in Greece, a uni-brow was a sign of beauty and intelligence in a woman. Those not born with brows that met in the middle drew the gap in with dark pigment, or, by some accounts, glued on a thin strip of goat hair to join them up. To the people living it, none of this looked strange, it looked expensive and it looked high-born. Now flip it around. Some of the things you would get complimented on today would have counted against you back then, or looked plain ugly. Take a tan and a bit of colour in the cheeks. The healthy glow people chase on beaches and in tanning boots. To most of the ancient world, that glow was the look of a field worker, sunburned and low-born. A wealthy person seeing it would not have thought you looked healthy. They would have thought you looked like hired labour. A lean, hard, muscular body was read the same way. The cut physique people admire in a gym today with low body fat and visible muscle often looked like the body of someone who did hard physical labour every day. For a woman especially, visible muscle and a thin frame suggested hunger and a hard life. Straight, bright, natural white teeth in a wide smile could also count against you. In several cultures, a plain white smile was seen as dull or unfinished, which is part of why people in places like Japan black and their teeth on purpose, treating a glossy black smile as elegant and grown up. A healthy beach tan, a flat stomach, a bright white smile. Walk into the ancient world with all three, and to the people who mattered, you would have looked distinctly poor. Some people change their looks for good, marking the body itself. Tattoos are old. The oldest preserved tattoos, belonged to a man known as Odsi. A body frozen in the Alps for over 5,000 years. His skin, still showing dozens of small inked lines. In ancient Egypt, women were buried with tattoos worked into their skin, patterns of dots and dashes across the stomach and thighs. Across the world, ink under the skin marked beauty, status, faith, or the group you belonged to, and the right markings made a person more desirable. Other cultures cut instead of inked. In scarification, the skin is deliberately cut or burned, so it heals into raised patterns, leaving permanent designs across the face, chest or back. A clean, well-formed set of scars showed beauty, maturity, and the ability to take real pain without flinching, which was its own kind of status. People stretched their bodies too, widening earlobes around discs and plugs, or stretching the lower lip around a plate until it held on its own. What looks extreme from the outside was, inside that culture, the mark of someone fully grown, respected, and worth looking at. Software versions of all of it are still around today, in any tattoo shop or piercing studio. Step back from all of it and the same thing keeps showing up, pale skin, soft hands, a full body, a styled wig, jade, set in the teeth, a long-shaped skull. On the surface they have nothing in common, underneath. They were almost all signs of the same few things. Wealth, because they took money, time, or labour, that a poor person did not have, health and fertility, because a strong, well-fed body meant someone likely to live, and to bear children, and status. The plain fact of being born into the right family, or holding the right place in the world, beauty worked as a signal, a glance, and without a single word, it showed that you were safe, well-off, and worth marrying. A pale, untanned face, a heavy body, an elongated head, none of these were within reach of the average person scraping a living out of the dirt. That was the whole point. They marked the line between the people who had to work to survive, and the people who did not. This is also why beauty standards keep changing. They tend to follow whatever happens to be rare and hard to get. When food was scarce, a full body was the prize. Once machines took over the hard labour and food turned cheap, a lean body and a tan, the very things that used to mean hardship became the new signs of an easy life. Beauty has almost always come down to the same quiet message. Look at me, my life is good. So yeah, that's it. If you sat through this whole thing just to have some guy tell you how ugly you'd be back then, you might as well hit subscribe, like it on your way out, and I'll see you in the next one.