Beauty is the quality present in a person, place or thing that gives intense and deep satisfaction to the mind. It is an individually pleasing, graceful, charming and beautiful aspect. Beauty is something extraordinary –excellent of its kind. Beauty is alluring, and it’s fascinating what beauty can be; especially to others.
Emily Dickinson once wrote “Beauty is not caused. It is.” Which I believe means that beauty does not grow into the flower we see, but already is beautiful as a seed. Every year of my life I grew more convinced that beauty was impossible to achieve. How could one be so beautiful if countless flaws overlapped the creature? How could someone be so breathtaking, so perfect? That idea of beauty came from magazine covers and advertisements that were bombarded with images of unobtainable male and female perfection, ones published countlessly than any other generation in history; our generation. The result: looking good is now a one-hundred-sixty-billion-dollars-a-year global industry, and in the United States we spend more money per year on beauty enhancements than we do on education. Beauty is sold to everyone and anyone. To whomever feels they must meet the standards to be beautiful and attractive in fear of being a worthless nobody, and let’s face it, no one wants to feel worthless.
So when these girls began to see six foot models the size of tooth picks, they began to starve themselves. When the star from some teen flick was photographed holding hands with some blonde chick from England, half the girls in my seventh grade class dyed their hair with bleach. Last year, I saw this girl reject a boy because he was fat and he worked very hard all summer to lose weight because he felt like he needed it to be accepted by some girl that looked nothing close to perfect. Even when the guys or girls in the locker room walk around naked you tend to feel insecure because, well you just do. Eventually we laugh it off, but deep inside we feel so disgusted to be in our own imperfect bodies. Actually, I have also felt that way, unattractive and ugly.
However, it doesn't make sense to call ourselves ugly because in all honesty, if you really think about it, we don't really see ourselves. We don't watch ourselves sleeping in bed curled up and silent with our chests rising and falling when we inhale then exhale. We can't see ourselves reading a book, eyes fluttering and glowing. You don't see yourself looking at someone with care inside of your heart. There is no mirror in your way when you're laughing and smiling and all of that joy is bursting out of you. You would know exactly how bright and beautiful you are if you saw yourself in the moments where you were truly beautiful, in someone else's eyes.
Till this day I haven’t found the true meaning of beauty, but I know it’s not the sex appeal that the media carelessly throws at us. To some, beauty is the birth of their new born child, the roses blooming in the spring in their garden, when a deaf woman hears sound for the first time thanks to modern science, and unfortunately, to some, beauty is lust, vanity and greed. Nevertheless, the real question hasn’t been answered. What do I think beauty is?
Real beauty is inside. It doesn’t matter what you look like –being skinny or flawless is not beauty. What we say and what we do is what defines us. The cover of the magazine might be eye catching and pretty, but if you open up the pages it’s just a punch of different personalities –writers, models and people of every kind. You are not a magazine, you are a person with only one personality that no one will ever have because it’s yours and that is beautiful. It is pleasing, graceful, charming and a beautiful aspect.