I am beautiful..Right?
Does this camera think about beauty
Think about the last time you looked, truly looked, in the mirror at yourself only to turn and seek approval from the person next to you. The thing is, there is only one person that you need approval from, and it is you.
You have trawled through that magazine, that Instagram page, your friends Facebook feed for the 12th time and how are you feeling? Happy, proud, calm, are you even smiling? Because if the answer to those questions is no, then I need you, you wonderful human, to put it down and just sit with me for one second. Grab a seat and let me tell you a story of how it took me 29 years to finally understand what beauty was, through my eyes.
When I was at school, I was not what you would call aesthetically pleasing to the eyeball. I had braces, big curly ginger hair, was a little bit chubby and wanted to wear clothes 4 times to small for me because those were what my friends were wearing. Notice I have said NOTHING about who I actually was, my personality or what I was interested in, and that is because, well, I didn’t know. All I knew is that I was ugly and loud and people would spend many a day reminding me of that. From a picture that was drawn of me and put up in the school corridor, from smiling at someone and them telling me to close my mouth because no one wanted to see that. And…what I still feel was the worst…no one wants to date you unless it is to date your friend, oh boy was he a charmer.
I need you to note something from all of those examples….not one of them was myself telling me I was ugly, it was from every body else’s perspective.
There is a saying that most of us are familiar with
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
After doing some research on the origin, it would seem that know one is exactly sure. Plato possibly said it at some point and then novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. I have some shocking news to tell those two, your views are old fashioned and need to stay over there with your scroll and your quill. I think this phrase is damaging for young women trying to find their own beauty. By saying it is in the eye of the beholder we give all of the power over to some one else, sometimes even a stranger.
Would you ask someone to tell you whether your hand bag is your hand bag, when you clearly know it is a handbag? No? Then why, if we will not do it with something as trivial as a possession, are we doing it to our own beauty?
My theory is because we, as women, have so much to compare beauty too that we have no idea how to ask ourselves about how beautiful we are. Also, the phrase does not allow for any sort of inner beauty to be taken into consideration. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…cool…I will just stand here in front of you all and you can decide if my beauty lives up to your type or standard.
Look…I am not ignoring the fact that what you look like is not the first thing that people see. We are animals after all, there is a very primal cave man instinct that lives deep within us all. So when we look at the fellow woman on Instagram or our friend coming towards us in the street, somewhere…subconsciously we wonder if they would have been the one to be clubbed over the head and dragged back to the dino cave.
Shock horror, there are no mirrors in the dino cave, or any books for any self preservation. So, I guess we just have to rely on that beholder to tell us we are beautiful.