“Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.” – Proverbs 11:22

“Drain the shallows.” It’s a great chapter title within Cal Newport’s classic-in-the-making, Deep Work. He’s thinking of the internet. In our eternal striving to appreciate true beauty, the shallows of social media have not done us any favors. Men and women now face a steeper climb up opposite sides of this mountain. In a world where people are known through pictures, it’s a tall task to cultivate inner beauty. How can you push past the surface, both in yourself and in how you view others?

The Bible’s chief aim is to help us see the world as it really is. We need to see our spiritual life and spiritual realities as the real stuff and everything else as the wrapper. “What is seen is transient, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18).

This proverb does just that. It paints a word picture (a gold ring in a pig’s snout) so visceral, so jarring that the phrase has worked its way into our secular imagination. It’s a matter of pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. You think you’re looking at a beautiful woman who perhaps makes some questionable decisions when in reality, it’s a pig with a nice piece of jewelry. It’s a way of recasting priorities. Does some external flashiness (the ring) now make you feel attracted to a pig? Maybe you should do some thinking about what that means about you.

Our society pours massive resources into fine-tuning our appearances. And this doesn’t just apply to women. There were no marketing degrees in the 19th century. The industry of appearance is larger now than any time in history—social media, reality TV, ad men, branding experts, and PR reps all slave away in the same factory. The problem is that they are all middlemen, polishing the gold on rings that go primarily in pig’s snouts.

In Solomon’s time, a gold ring in a woman’s nose would have carried clear cultural cachet. Here is elegance, affluence, status, class (Gen 24:47-48). It was a fashion symbol, and fashion symbols are shorthand ways of signaling a lifestyle. But a symbol does not equate to a lifestyle. I can put on a camo hunting jacket, but that doesn’t mean you should follow me into the woods with a rifle at five in the morning.

There is nothing wrong with looking attractive. We enjoy beauty because God is beautiful. But once you’ve appreciated the gold ring, the Bible urges you to look beyond it. True beauty comes from below the surface and it radiates up.

Jesus had “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Is 53:2). This was intentional. You think God couldn’t have made his only son with a chiseled jawline and striking blue eyes? Yet Jesus is the most attractive person who ever lived. His beauty came from his heart, love, and sacrifice. That’s the beauty God wants to show us and give us.

For more thoughts on this topic, check out “Substance over semblance”.