Store-Bought Beauty

The idea of beauty is one that always fascinates me, and quite often a topic of conversation between me and my friends, these friends being both male and female. Which celebrities do we think are beautiful? What is it that makes someone beautiful? And what about the word beautiful itself; when is it okay to use it? In reference to a building, a person, words written or spoken? So many questions about something that people never seem to agree on.

It is my personal opinion that the word ‘beautiful’ is powerful. To use it to describe someone is completely different to describing them using other adjectives: nice, pretty, attractive, gorgeous, all of them synonyms of beautiful and yet none of them the same. Not even close. Take beautiful and gorgeous: to be gorgeous seems to be much more fleeting than being beautiful. Things of beauty last for a long time, whereas something that is gorgeous does not have a lasting effect. It catches your attention for a while, whether a few minutes or a few months, but it’s almost as if something beautiful will stay with you forever.

The quest for perfection in regards to beauty is beginning to frighten me. Pictures of Heidi Montag that appeared in the media last month both shocked and revolted me. At the young age of 23, she has had so much surgery that she no longer looks human; her resemblance to a mannequin is uncanny. Whatever she was trying to achieve has failed dramatically. She looks like a middle aged woman trying to recapture her youth. I am not against plastic surgery. I’m an 18 year old girl and I can more than sympathise with the insecurities one would feel about whatever imperfections they may have, whether real or in their head. But 10 surgeries in one day? More than $30,000 dollars on procedures? That is something I cannot understand. There is more to beauty than just a pretty face.

Surgery can buy you a smaller nose, bigger breasts, less wrinkles and many more besides, but how you look is only a small part of what makes you attractive. Having the kind of physical attractiveness that makes people look at you twice can be easily counteracted by an ugly personality. Cruelty, selfishness, and all of those unattractive qualities that people can have cannot be ignored just because you look good. In fact, the more attractive you are, the quicker you lose that attractiveness when you’re personality is unattractive. The most beautiful people I know are note just attractive; they have something else about them that makes them beautiful. It comes from within; a combination of kindness, confidence and a general well-rounded personality. I don’t mean, of course, that there are not parts of everyone’s personality that can be seen as ugly, but they don’t try and make the way they look out-shadow the person that they are. They want people to like them for them, not their face or their body. In doing this, they just make themselves more attractive without even meaning to.

Make-up, surgery, a desperate need to wear the latest fashion...I can understand the contribution these things make to being attractive, and why to some they are so important, but when things get drastic, and people start getting addicted to surgery, you have to ask yourself why this has happened. Where has this pressure come from? I know some would plan the media, or the fashion industry, but I don’t believe that it is fair to put the blame on either of these institutions. The pressure comes from you. Not being happy with yourself and not being able to accept yourself for who you are. There is no such thing as universal perfection, what appeals to one will not necessarily appeal to another, and so this quest is a pointless one to undertake as you will never prevail. Have faith in the belief that one day someone will see you for more than just your face and will not only think you are beautiful, but make you believe it too. End the search. What it is you’re looking for just doesn’t exist.