What Happens When Someone Says You're Beautiful

Are you having a rough morning? Then click your little self over to the short film "People React to Being Called Beautiful" as fast as possible, because it's more heartwarming than a box full of kittens wrapped in blankets (or as I like to call them, purr-itos) hand-delivered to your bed by a baby sloth. With the airport scene from Love Actually playing in the background, and I don't make that kind of comparison lightly.

The film was posted earlier this year, but it's only recently begun making the rounds on social media. Created by 18-year-old Chicago student Shea Glover, its premise is simple: She filmed the reactions of different people at her high school — some of whom she knew, most of whom she didn't — as she told them that she was taking pictures of things she found beautiful. Like many artistic endeavors, the project didn't start out that way; initially, it was an independent senior project that morphed into a social experiment. "Halfway through, I realized the reactions were actually pretty interesting, so [I thought], 'Let me make a video out of it,'" she explains in a follow-up to the film.

You'd think that five minutes of the same statement over and over again would get old, but it doesn't, largely because each person's reaction is totally different. There are some similarities, of course: The "why is this stranger bothering me?" face, the penny drop, the inevitable smile, etc. That being said, the variety of reactions speaks volumes about what we find beautiful, and — perhaps more importantly — how we're conditioned to see it in ourselves. Some people go the traditional smile-and-thanks route:

Others are a little shyer.

Heartbreakingly, some even look around as if wondering where the beautiful object is before they realize Glover is speaking about them. These reactions are perhaps the most poignant, as they make it clear how narrow traditional definitions of beauty can be. "I didn't realize so many people don't hear it, or they don't tell themselves that," Glover said in the follow-up video.

As tough as it is to see people struggle to accept a compliment, the video is still bound to put a smile on your face. Trust me on this one — I'm the proud possessor of a blackened, cynical heart, and I could feel it stir to life a little during the film. (Just a little. Don't get any ideas.) Check out the video below:

Images: shea glover/YouTube (4)