✨ Why Beauty Matters 💐
Foreman, C (2026) Beauty-inspired digital collage 💐
I am someone who lives for beauty, every single day.
As a neurodivergent artist, I have a brain that is actively wired to notice, look for, and find awe in beautiful, everyday moments. Just seeing light hit the edge of a flower, or a rainbow in the sky, is a deeply inspiring and regulating sensory experience for me.
I am flooded with joy when beauty is present.
Foreman, C. (2026) Co-creating Mini Beauty Moments
Research on Beauty & Humans
It’s not just me that lights up when beauty is near. Research shows that as humans, beauty is wired into us to help us detect whether people and places feel safe, harmonious and kind. It also enables us to create meaning, healing and bolster our wellbeing (Magsamen and Ross, (2023).
My exquisite Angelwing Begonia house plant 🪴
Foreman, C. (2026) Making Mini Beauty Moments.
Just as beauty can help us determine if environments feel safe, inspired and harmonious, places devoid of beauty can do just the opposite - make us feel disconnected, unsafe and depressed.
A Mini Beauty Moment
To put this into perspective:
Think of a city, full of grey concrete, and straight, man-made lines. You can barely see the sky and it’s cold.
Now envision a park filled with greenery, rolling hills, vast blue sky and a rainbow. The sun warms your skin and there’s trees for shade when you need it.
Notice: Which feels more healthy and expansive inside your body? Where do you feel more agency, aliveness and safety?
This internal shift lets us know that beauty has a strong influence on our wellbeing.
Our local puppy park where we go for regular walks 🐾
We are wired to notice, embrace and co-create with beauty, and we’ve literally evolved alongside it. It’s only in recent millennia that manmade places and spaces have replaced beauty with function and financial growth — and as humans, we inherently feel the disconnect.
Why?
We are made to live amongst beauty.
Gorgeous, rugged local wetlands near my home on Gubbi Gubbi Country.
We really don’t have to go far to connect with beauty, and in fact, we can bring it into our lives to bolster our wellbeing on a daily basis.
A Creative Beauty prompt:
Look around the room you’re in, or better yet, step outside for this little experience.
Scan your eyes around the environment and find a place, pocket or vignette that feels beauty-full. Be sure to look up, down, close up and wide. It could be a small detail or pattern on a fabric or plant leaf. Or it could be an overall area, like a vast cloud formation.
Using your phone or camera, fill the view-finder with this image that evokes beauty for you, and take a picture. Sense a moment of reverence for this moment of beauty you’ve just co-created with the space around you. It only takes a minute to notice beauty, and you’ll always be better for it!
You now have an image to remind you of how you feel when you’re with beauty, you might like to make some meaning with the image.
Save your beauty image as your screen saver, print it out and pop it on your fridge or desk, or maybe sit down with some pens or watercolours and have a go at recreating the essence of the beauty image, from your felt sense of experiencing it.
The key is not to get caught up in perfect representation, its the honour the joy of co-creating with beauty via the colours, textures and shapes you sense.
Foreman, C. (2026). Beauty-full Moments.
Join my upcoming Beautify Arts Workshop
If you’d love to take a deeper dive into Beauty with me, I’d love to see you at my upcoming Peri-Women-Pause ‘Beautify’ online therapeutic arts workshop, on July 15.
We get together each month to focus on a different topic for mid-life wellbeing, and you can join us either casually just for this session, or treat yo-self a monthly creative ritual as a member.
With creativity and care,
Chrissy 🌸🪴💐
