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About the Real Beauty

According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary, beauty is the quality of being pleasing to the senses or to the mind. There is also a proverb that says:

Beauty is in theeye of the beholder

. This means that something or someone is beautiful, depending on the person who is looking.We all have different ideas of what constitutes beauty and these ideas differ fromone to another, just as the joy and satisfaction we get from it differs. Therefore, it isalmost impossible to set a universal definition which could be applied to the concept of beauty. We, the people, are completely different and it is no surprise that our ideas aretotally different as well. What some of us consider to be beautiful others think of it asnothing special.As children we all have read books about heroes and heroines, mostly fairy tales,who were beautiful and handsome and it is no surprise that many of us thought that, inorder to become a good person, we have to be beautiful. It was a hard time growing upfor me because as soon as I saw somebody who is more beautiful then me, I becameworried, because it meant to me that I am not a good person since I am not beautifulenough. However, as I grew up I somehow realized that the physical beauty is nothingmore than a farce. I realized that the real beauty is not only that, what we can see with our eyes, it is something more complex, something which gives us a feeling of joy that leavesa great impression on us. We tend to create stereotypes which mean that in order to benoticed and in order to be seen as a beauty we need to have good looks. What must beconsidered here is the fact that in our society handsomeness gives us many advantagessuch as having a good social life, getting a job, making friends and many other advantages. Each day, we see beautiful models, singers and actors on television and weconsider them as our role-model and a person we should look up to. However, mostly, thetruth is that all their beauty is fancy on the outside but completely rotten in the inside.1

In my opinion, the real beauty is the one which gives you pleasure and a lastingmemory which will never fade away. People who are not considered as being physicallyattractive should use their inner beauty to present themselves to others. As the matter of fact, we should use our inner values in order to let the world to get to know the real us, because this is what really counts in this life. The inner beauty is intentional, we work onit, whereas the physical beauty is accidental and we cannot choose it. This fact impliesthat, if we are gifted with inner beauty, we are obliged to keep and look after it. If our beauty comes from the inside, our faces reflect radiance, brightness, peace and love because it is the mirror of our soul, and I love this inner beauty which mirrors itself in theeyes of a person.The concept of beauty has changed through history and every period has its ownideals of what should be or is considered as beautiful. When thinking of beauty weusually think of women, the female body which has always been seen as a realrepresentative of the concept beautiful. The obsession with the female body exists as longas the human race exists, and it has been explored in almost every segment of our lives,especially art. Back then, in ancient times and renaissance a voluminous female body wasconsidered beautiful, in the 50’s the term a blond sex bomb was introduced, and nowskinny looking models on drugs and alcohol are considered to be beautiful. Thisevolution clearly shows the drastic change of our perception of the beauty. The female body used to be a mystery and an unexplored field and this fact may be the reason why itis present in art. Nowadays, it is exploited to the extent where it became completelyuninteresting to us. The newspapers and magazines are filled with naked women andtherefore there is nothing mysterious about the female body anymore.Being a woman is especially hard these days, because we are constantly being bombarded by the media about how we should look, which products we should use,which leads to depression and dissatisfaction by most of the women, who have problemswith seeing themselves as being beautiful. For instance, Helen Fielding in her novel

Bridget Jones’s

Diary

, acknowledges that the femininity is in the least bit natural: “Beinga woman is worse than being a farmer-there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to2

be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eye-brows plucked, feet pumiced, skinexfoliated and moisturized, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed,cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised. The whole performance is so highlytuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to seed. Sometimes Iwonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature-with a full beard and handlebar,moustache on each shin” (p.30). With this I want to imply that women have a great job intaking care of their looks but it is not a right thing to concentrate everything around thelooks and there are a few women who consider themselves as being beautiful. To be sure,women want to be physically attractive and they want to be perceived as such. Their looks are important to how they feel about themselves, how they regard beauty inthemselves and in others. Women should less appreciate the physical beauty and start toregard being beautiful as the result of qualities and circumstance: being loved, beingengaged in activities that one wants to do, having a close relationship, being happy, beingkind, having confidence, exuding dignity and humor. Women, who are like this, in myopinion, look beautiful.The power of beauty is more powerful than we think because it tends to corruptand spoil people. What follows from this is that beautiful people mostly become arrogantand mean towards other people, taking their beauty as an excuse for all the bad thingsthey do. The best example are all those supermodels and big stars who allow themselvesto do things for which, we others, would be punished for. This again leads to theassumption that good looks usually bring more advantages than disadvantages. It is truethat physical beauty opens many locked doors but in the end, when people lose it andstart to neglect their inner feelings, the same doors will be closed.The beauty is all around us and the only problem is that we have becomehandicapped and unable to find it. We have become too obsessed with small andunimportant things. We have become incapable of appreciating what we have and tend tosearch for things that can only bring a limited satisfaction. Cervantes put it nicely: “Thereis a kind of beauty which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections. “3