Your username is full of awesome–it’s one of my favourites here on the boards. 
Aww, thank you so much - that’s a lovely thing to say!
Posted too soon - I meant to say also say that I agree with the points made about it being socially unacceptable to say that you think you’re pretty - I have to admit, I was half-expecting a bad reaction to my comment about my looks earlier in the thread. And there is a culture amongst women that if another woman gives you a compliment, you’re supposed to hotly deny it, and then come back with a much more effusive compliment for them. But I firmly believe that there are enough people in the world who will put you down without you doing it yourself, so I always try to respond to compliments with a hearty “thank you”!
Oni no Maggie, Sleeps with Butterflies, and Jennyrosity pretty much nail the reasons women may deny or downplay compliments (with extra points to SWB for quoting Mean Girls). I totally get why people do that, and how culturally ingrained it is, but when I see people do it, I always think "we’re not in junior high anymore, a simple ‘thank you’ would have been great’. I wish more people would break themselves of it, because it doesn’t generally come off self-effacing, it comes off as fishing. And I’ve often thought that guys don’t get it, and must find it exhausting.
Karl Grenze also makes a good point, but I wonder, doesn’t that wear off eventually? I mean, unless you’re either unselfconscious to the point of saintliness or fall somewhere on the autism scale, if you’re pretty, you’ve gotta notice at some point that people react differently to you than they do to other people.
That said, you can certainly *know *you’re pretty and still not *feel *pretty. My awkward phase only lasted a couple of years, but I still revisit occasionally. I imagine it’s harder to escape that mindset the longer you’re in it. I think it’s likely that if you’ve more or less always been considered pretty, it’s “I don’t feel pretty today”, whereas if you suddenly blossomed at 20, it’d take a while for feeling pretty to become your normal.
Not if you read a lot of gossip magazines. Or live in New York.
The question in the thread title was “what do you think” not “what do you say.” I say “thank you,” but what I’m going to say isn’t really the point, is it?
Or, you notice at some point that people don’t react differently to you or worse that you may as well be invisible when an actually beautiful/pretty/cute-at-certain-angles woman shows up.
Then when someone gives an attractiveness based compliment, it fails to come across as sincere.