What's the Connection Between Envy and Glamour?

And is envy really so bad?

No one understands envy as deeply as teenage girls do. When I was thirteen, I was on fire with it all the time. I envied the girls on Laguna Beach (always and forever Team LC!). With their highlighted hair and good bone structure and effortless tans and Tiffany charm bracelets, and the cute surfer boys who liked them, Lauren and Kristin had everything I wanted. I lived in nearby Huntington Beach, but I had braces and a nose that was too big for my face and hair that was routinely described as “dishwater” (which has now been rebranded into “old money blonde” by Gen Z. They don’t know how good they have it). I envied the girls in my grade with straight teeth and clear skin and parents who could look each other in the eye. I envied the models in Vogue pictorials—back when Vogue kind of had a point of view—who were so thin and tall and graceful. Nothing felt further away to me. My insecurities were boundless. Envy charged almost every hour of my waking life.

Envy is famously demonized as a sin. It’s also a pretty ugly feeling. The ache to possess something you don’t have, but someone else does—it hurts! No wonder we try to suppress it when it emerges.

But lately, I’ve realized that envy and glamour—while very different internal experiences—are related. They’re both forms of projection and longing. And they both present us with versions, however fragmented, of our Fantasy Selves. But they’re also not the same thing, not at all. Comparing them will help us understand both experiences better—and show us that envy isn’t in itself a bad thing. To acquaint yourself with my working definition of glamour, see my first essay on the subject.

Part One: Envy and its Characteristics

Envy comes from old French envie, and its Latin root word invidere literally means to look upon. It bears a connotation of malice. But in its original sense, envy involves seeing with our eyes. The emotion is dependent on an external stimulus.

An Emotion That Stings

I want you to think about the last time you felt envious. Did it make your ears hot with shame? Did it make you hate that other person for having what you don’t? Did it make you feel small? Chances are, you didn’t tell anyone about experiencing this emotion. It tasted bitter. You’ve no desire (not consciously, anyways) to repeat the experience. Envy is the experience of resenting someone who has what you don’t.

Rarely Deliberate

The production of envy is usually unwitting—that is to say, the object of your envy has no idea that they’ve elicited such an emotion. A long time ago I worked with a girl who had a lot of charisma. She was just one of those people who seemed at home in herself—charming but completely unconsciously. I was…not that! And I envied her for it. But she wasn’t trying to get me to envy her. She was just being authentic and true to herself.

Part Two: Glamour and Envy, Contrasted

Glamour, on the other hand, is often (but not always) deliberately created. This is why it’s frequently leveraged in advertising. Glamour also can’t exist without mystery, without grace. Just like humor depends on the subversion of expectations, glamour depends on aesthetic parameters. And just as envy refers to the act of seeing with our eyes, so too is glamour most often created in visual mediums. That’s why, at least at first, I think it’s easy for us to conflate these two experiences.

Both envy and glamour are internal responses to external stimuli. But envy is a defined, specific emotion, whereas glamour can elicit many emotions, most of them positive. Some of these are longing, hope, pleasure and joy. Glamour is also more likely to trigger daydreams and fantasies. Envy doesn’t—because it’s longing with a presumed dead end. The whole reason why it hurts so much is because of the belief that you can’t have what that person has. An underlying supposition of scarcity or unworthiness is what gives envy its vinegar-sharp sting.

Part Three: How to Turn Envy Into Something Useful

Both envy and glamour can be useful because they show us that we want something. A quality, an experience, an achievement, a possession. Often, though not always, we weren’t aware of this desire before envy or glamour shows up on the scene. Each internal experience can make subconscious desires conscious. But envy makes us feel small, whereas glamour is aspirational. With glamour, we feel like we could achieve that quality or state of being. The transformation seems within our grasp. (If you’re not convinced, we’ll engage with this aspect of glamour very soon—for now, you’ll just have to trust me.)

The trick here is to relate to your feelings of envy with curiosity instead of judgment. The next time you feel envious of someone, define clearly what they have that you think you can’t have yourself. Many times it’s an outlandish or impossible desire. Maybe it would embarrass you if your friends knew you wanted that thing. But what is it really about? Do you really want the new Jeep that your friend Ben just bought? Great! But maybe what you’re really searching for is freedom, adventure, or confidence. There are many conveyances available to you. A Jeep is just one of them. Learning to box or going solo camping for the first time could bring you an identical internal experience to owning a Jeep. You could access feelings of freedom, adventure, or confidence without the thing.

I realize this probably sounds elementary but I think there’s so much value in examining our desires with curiosity and getting creative about how we could fulfill those desires in ways that are available to us now, or in the near future, without getting into debt, or buying something we won’t end up using. I’ve had to reverse engineer the same process as a marketer—diverting desires for internal experiences into desires for physical things—but doing it the other way around is typically more rewarding. (Yes, I have a large degree of cognitive dissonance about my profession. I minored in philosophy. Cognitive dissonance is my stock-in-trade!)

Next, consider if your presumptions about scarcity or unworthiness are even true. Perhaps you can’t have the Jeep now because it’s too expensive. Could you have it in five years? Maybe the thing you want is more achievable than you think, and what’s holding you back is your own negative beliefs about yourself or some lackadaisical budgeting. Those are both things you can change, if you want!

There will also be the exceptions—the desires that will truly go unmet no matter how much we can improve our own external circumstances or internal experience. Thirteen year old me deeply envied my friends whose parents were in love, or at least loved each other. It was totally foreign to me—I had never known a home environment that felt like a cocoon of emotional security and stability. I was never going to experience that, sadly. I still think that acknowledging our doomed desires causes less suffering than trying to suppress them or judge them away. You might call this shadow work.

You can also do much of this internal excavation—examining your desires and the desires behind them, honoring the tender or wounded aspects of yourself—with glamour instead of envy as the inciting event. But I felt compelled to compare the two experiences because sometimes a negative definition is more illustrative.

Next week, we’ll explore one of the aesthetic parameters of glamour that differentiates it—the appearance of grace.