Songfacts®:

• Ingrid Michaelson's Stranger Songs album is a collection of tracks inspired by the Netflix television series Stranger Things. This female anthem explores themes of femininity and what it really means to be "pretty." The subject matter was inspired by the show's telekinetic character Eleven, who was raised without conceptions of gender norms. Michaelson explained to iHeartRadio:
  
  "'Pretty' is about the concept of what makes a girl or a woman pretty. Beautiful. And there's a scene where the boys dress Eleven up like a girl, and they put her in a blond wig and a pink dress, and Mike says, 'She looks pretty... Good. Pretty good.' He's embarrassed to say she looks pretty. And she looks in the mirror and she says, 'Pretty. Good.'
  
  And then by the end of the episode, the wig is gone and she has the jacket on and she's covered in dirt, and it's like, she's totally herself. But I thought it was interesting, the sort of blond hair, pink dress trope of, like, that makes a girl pretty, and I wanted to just sort of examine that."
• Michaelson wrote the song in Los Angeles with Sarah Aarons (Khalid, Maren Morris) and Alex Hope (Troye Sivan, Carly Rae Jepsen). She said: "It's actually my first song that I wrote that's all female-driven in every way. So, it seemed apropos to write a powerful anthemic song about what really, truly makes somebody beautiful; it's their power, it's their strength."