Elizabeth

Beauty (re)defined
Our whole lives, we have grown up with adult’s description of beauty as “it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” In elementary school, we were told that everyone was to be included, especially on Valentine’s Day. Like most classrooms across the country, the rule was, if you were going to give a card to one person, then you have to give everyone else a card as well. Entering into middle school this same message was implemented into our minds as well, with signs that read “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But somewhere along the way, this idea that beauty was past the surface, was dropped. For most girls (and guys), the idealized image of beauty is to look like the model, Gisele Bündchen or soccer superstar, David Beckham. Drastic measures are taken to obtain this idealized image of beauty. Eye brows are waxed, faces re-sculpted, breast enhanced, and extreme dieting measures taken. But what if beauty truly is “what’s on the inside that counts?”
Once the superficiality of looks and images are cast aside, beauty becomes something much more capturing and intimate. Ask any man truly in love with his wife what makes her most beautiful and I doubt he would say her looks. Actress Amanda Peet, puts it well “Beauty is only skin deep. If you go after someone just because she's beautiful but don't have anything to talk about, it's going to get boring fast.” Beauty is the mother who hasn’t slept in weeks but still gets up in the middle of the night to check on her sleeping baby. Beauty is the flower that grows through the weeds, or even the weeds themselves, that have suffered much and still manage to grow. Beauty is the stars in the sky, which manage to shine bright, even on the darkest nights. Beauty is the giggle of a baby. Beauty is you.
In a society where so much focus is place on beauty, it’s dangerous to break away from the norm.   Putting focus on looks isn’t bad but the real danger comes when outer beauty is placed on a much higher pedestal. True beauty is more than a size two jeans or having the clearest skin. Beauty is generosity and good will to neighbors. Beauty is a smile. Beauty is dancing in the rain. Beauty is not caring whose watching. Beauty is confidence. Beauty is you.
Sometimes true beauty is hard to come by. It’s not easy to discover what true beauty is because, often the definition of it is so obscure. Conformity and fitting in is most important to the superficial idea of beauty, but true beauty is much more. True beauty is the willingness to take a stand for something, it’s the ability to laugh and be real. True beauty can’t be confined to a set of standards in which a few select people decide what’s beautiful and what’s not. Beauty isn’t pain. It doesn’t require lipstick. It doesn’t need to be bought. Beauty only needs to be brought out into the open. Beauty from the inside isn’t a norm in society. Walls have to be torn down. People need to see that beauty is more than being voted sexiest man or women alive. Those who go against the norms of society have always been thought to weird or strange but who know, maybe once and for all, it truly will be “what’s on the inside that counts.”