Popular without Peach Blossom: where does charm come from?

If you have ever had your Four Pillars read, you may have had this experience. You were told "You don't have Peach Blossom," yet there are always people around you. You may even be more popular than a friend who supposedly has it.

In Lesson 1 we said that Peach Blossom is the scent of the peach flower: a charm felt face to face, reaching those who come close. So where does the popularity of someone without Peach Blossom come from?

The answer is simple. Charm comes in more than one kind, and Peach Blossom is only one of them.

Think of the people around you, and popular people look quite different from one another.

Of these, Peach Blossom covers only the first: "charm when face to face." The rest come from other places in the chart.

Even without Peach Blossom, people gather if just one of these is clear. Having no Peach Blossom reads not as "having no charm" but as your charm coming from somewhere other than Peach Blossom.

In Lesson 1 we said that "scent does not carry well through a screen." Then what do people who gather others through video, writing and social media gather them with?

That power usually comes not from Peach Blossom but from the Output stars (食傷). The Output stars are the force that takes what is inside you and shows it outside. It reaches people even without meeting, even at a distance.

So someone with no Peach Blossom but clear Output stars may look plain at a first meeting yet win great popularity through writing or on screen. Conversely, someone with Peach Blossom but weak Output stars may draw people in person yet not stand out on screen. This pairs exactly with the worry from Lesson 1: "I have Peach Blossom, so why am I not popular?"

What the past called "popularity" was mostly the power to attract the opposite sex. As we saw in Lesson 1, that power showed only at drinking parties and in relationships between men and women, and Peach Blossom was in charge of it.

Other kinds of charm were not called charm. Being upright and dependable was "virtue," writing and speaking well was "talent," and making friends widely was "skill with people." All were good things, but they went by names other than popularity.

Today is different. Followers, subscribers, reputation, regular customers and recommendations are all popularity. The channels of popularity have grown from one, the opposite sex, to many, and the places in a chart that create popularity besides Peach Blossom have grown with them.

Even with no Peach Blossom in your natal chart, there are periods when a Peach Blossom character comes in through your ten-year luck or the luck of a single year. Those can be read as times when you meet people face to face more than usual, and when attraction tends to arise in those meetings.

In Four Pillars it is also held that a force missing from the natal chart can be drawn in between other characters, or filled by luck. But it does not come by itself. Drawing in what you lack takes a matching effort. If someone without Peach Blossom wants to grow their face-to-face charm, deliberately making more occasions to meet people in person is that effort.

The old books did not see attraction as one thing either. The Sanming Tonghui (三命通會) set up Crimson Glow and Peach Blossom separately:

It also looked for people who shine through writing and learning somewhere other than Peach Blossom:

And as we saw in Lesson 1, the Di Tian Sui (滴天髓) rated Peach Blossom itself low:

That popularity cannot be decided by Peach Blossom alone is something the old books already said.

Whether your charm shows face to face, on screen or as trust built up over time cannot be settled by the characters of a chart alone. See which paths historical figures with a similar temperament chose in their own era, and compare them with the paths open to you now.