Not everyone is beautiful

Beauty doesn’t matter, right? It’s more than your looks, it’s more than your skin or hair. Beauty is about those qualities that make us good people. All those inspirational posts about beauty tell us that beauty needs to be redefined.

While men often hesitate before admitting another man looks good, most women openly admit it when other women look pretty. I’ve seen beautiful women and I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous women. Men, too. But men aren’t allowed to be beautiful. They are supposed to be handsome, with rugged good looks, maybe some facial hair, a slightly mean twist to their lips and piercing looks.

Going back to beauty, you can’t say everyone is beautiful. Yes, beauty is subjective but we all have some definition of what isn’t beautiful, and through this definition we come to some agreement about what and who can be considered beautiful.

When we compliment, we choose our words carefully. ‘You look nice today’ isn’t the same as ‘you are wearing a nice dress.’ Even the words nice and beautiful have such different meanings. Nice, pleasant, cute, beautiful, pretty, hot, gorgeous, there are so many ways to describe a person’s appearance.

If a girl calls herself ugly, people try to convince her that beauty is much more than looks and that everyone is beautiful in their own way. But before you do this, remember that this girl really knows what she looks like. She knows that next to the girls who appear in movies or advertisements, she is a real Plain Jane. And yet, people try to convince her that she is beautiful even though the internet is full of posts that ridicule people with unibrows, stretch marks, flabby tummies and dry hair. They convince us that we are born beautiful even though they can’t leave the house without painting their faces.

Image results when I googled 'beauty.' Where are all those posts about natural beauty?

We don’t need to redefine beauty. Van Gogh paintings sold because those paintings are beautiful. So many other painters couldn’t make it because their work lacked beauty. Beauty should be appreciated. Then what about us, those who aren’t beautiful? What about the people who will never be fair enough, good enough to be appreciated by others? Will an art gallery continue to display an exhibit no one stops to look at? I doubt it.

So we need to get rid of those ‘beauty doesn’t matter’ posts, because they aren’t helping anyone. Instead, we should be told to appreciate beauty but also remember that life isn’t only about being beautiful. Sure, no one wants to live in a garbage dump but the world needs those garbage dumps.

Yes, I did just compare people to a garbage dump, but that’s the truth, right? Not all of us are beautiful. Some of us are born ugly and we would be able to live with this if the world stopped always telling us in subtle and not-very-subtle ways that beauty matters. We would be able to not obsess over our thick eyebrows, thin lips, crooked noses, awkward facial hair and blotchy skin is people stopped telling us that what we look like doesn't matter because beauty is more than how we look, for this is another way of saying, "you are ugly, but it's rude to say that so I'll tell you something that might make you feel better about your ugly face."

We know what we look like, we really do, but we were born this way and there should be no reason for us to change the way we look.