The global news cycle has been dominated by one name since June 25, of course: Michael Jackson.  Our deepest condolences go out to his family and friends, and especially his three children.  What a sad end to a brilliant and troubled life.

But we come here to dissect the King of Pop, not to praise him.  More to the point, to take a look at Michael Jackson from a beauty perspective, because it’s hard to think of another person in recent times who better embodied the self-destructive power of a cancerous sense of Inner Beauty.  As you know from our many discussions, Inner Beauty is the core of all true beauty, and it’s within our minds and hearts.  It’s the most vital aspect of the Beauty-Brain Loop, the interlinked quartet of Inner Beauty, Health, Outer Beauty and Environment that creates every person’s total beauty picture.

The foundation of Inner Beauty is self-love.  Call it self-esteem, self-worth or whatever you like, the idea is the same: you must cherish who and what you are and find yourself precious.  That’s not to say you can’t and shouldn’t improve yourself, but if you’re healthy that improvement will stem from the desire to be the best person you can be.  When self-change comes about as a result of self-hatred, desperation to please others, or the desire to change and leave a poisonous past behind, that’s when it can mutate into something dangerous.  We see that regularly in patients who have substance abuse problems.  It’s all born of the same impulse, to become someone else, anyone else.

It’s not a stretch to say that the late Michael Jackson was the patron saint of such self loathing.  Just look at how he changed physically from his 1979 Off the Wall album to the bizarre and sad years and months before his death.  In 1979, we saw a young, slender and handsome African-American man.  But over the years, Jackson slowly whitened his skin, shaved down his nose until there was almost nothing left, and seemed not only to want to shed his tumultuous family past but his race, his gender and even his humanity.  What was left in his later years was a pale phantasm who rarely went into the sun, wore a surgical mask over his face, and looked more like a figure at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum than the stunning, beautiful young man who brought us Thriller in 1982.  Eva lived not far from the Jackson family and witnessed Michael’s overworked childhood and meteoric rise to success.  That cold, disruptive upbringing most likely led to an inability to develop a healthy self-esteem.

What was Michael running from?  What had corroded his sense of Inner Beauty so terribly that he could not stand to be who he had been born as and seemed to be obsessed with morphing into something new each minute?  What had caused him to develop not just body dysmorphia but what could be called “self dysmorphia?”  When he looked in the mirror, what did he see?  The sad irony is that, even as he became stranger and stranger in what seems to have been a desperate attempt to transform his identity—to be happy, one assumes—popular culture began to see him less as a genius and more as a sideshow.  His obvious self-hatred overshadowed and eventually eclipsed his incredible talent.  He was a casualty of life, unable to see in himself the beauty and electricity we had seen in him.

The global pop culture machine will mourn for a while.  Quick books will be turned out.  Commorative DVDs and plates will be stamped out.  Spontaneous shrines will linger for a while.  Television retrospectives will air and perhaps a tribute concert will be staged.  Eventually, something else will dominate the news.  But while we won’t ever forget Michael Jackson and his music, we should also never forget his lesson.  Success is defined within, not by record sales.  If the King of Pop couldn’t find joy and self-love with his riches and fame, no one can.  Inner Beauty is more important than money or notoriety.

Rest in peace, Michael.

Debi & Eva