Response

     Picture Perfect

     A little while ago in my college English class, we were placed into groups and given a magazine to go through. Our assignment: look through the magazine and pick out all the different concepts. My group was given an issue of Men's Health magazine.

     While we were looking through the magazine we saw pictures of attractive men on almost every page. Although this magazine is meant for the “average Joe,” none of these men looked like the men you see on a daily basis. They were all super toned, tan, and perfect. In these pictures they were all dressed very well and looked like they just stepped off the runway. Their smiles were perfectly white, and they looked like a million bucks. But what I noticed in these pictures were the women that were literally hanging all over these big, strong, perfect men.

     The women all looked perfect. Not one of these women was above a size 4 and they were all gorgeous. On top of being super skinny, they had perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect make-up, perfect smiles, and to top it all off, they were hanging on the arm of an extremely attractive man who was wearing a shirt just snug enough to show off his big muscles. They were perfect, and when I saw these women hanging on these men, it made me think. What is beauty?

     Is beauty measured solely on how we appear on the outside? In today's society, everybody is completely caught up in how they look. The advertisements on television tell you that you need to lose weight, wear this kind of make-up, and wear these clothes. Basically, the advertisements tell that you are fat, ugly, and have no sense of style.

     Although this is most likely not true, we all believe it. Especially as a young woman, we generally have low self-esteem already, and those commercials are just icing on the cake. (Even though we won't eat cake anymore because we're fat according to the commercials.) We decide that we need to change our outward appearance because they say we need to. We buy the clothes and the make-up, we buy the fat burning pills, and we get a membership to a gym. We think that by changing our appearance, we will become more appealing to others in society. We think that we will instantaneously become drop-dead gorgeous and have these perfect men falling at out feet.

     For example, when we sit down and watch TV and an advertisement for clothing comes on, there are no unattractive people featured in the twenty second clip. Every person in the commercial is perfectly toned and super attractive. Their clothes are perfect, they have amazing hair, and at the end of the commercial, they flash that perfectly white smile. When they look perfect, everybody wants to go right out and buy these clothes.

     Now imagine the same commercial. But instead of perfectly toned and flawless people, the actors are slightly overweight, they have blemishes on their faces, and their hair isn't exactly what we call “perfect.” Would people still want to buy the clothes? Probably not.

     What's really sad, is that even though the second option is closer to reality, we all want to buy the clothes from the first commercial because we will then look more attractive like the people in the commercial. We don't want to look normal. We want to look beautiful and perfect.

     Although we try extremely hard to be perfect, the truth is that we will never be “perfect.” We will always want to change something. Our hips are too wide, our butt is too flat, and our skin is too wrinkled, our nose is too big, our ears stick out weird, our legs are chubby, we have bags under our eyes, our arms are flabby, and our neck is sagging. This is just how we think. We always find flaws with ourselves because we compare ourselves to the “perfect” people we see on TV.

     Instead of focusing on what we look like on the outside, we should work on what we look like on the inside. When we can look at our character and see ourselves as beautiful people on the inside, then we will become beautiful to other people. We might not become physically “beautiful,” but our character will shine through and people will see us for what we truly are – beautiful. As the old saying goes, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” When we can see ourselves as beautiful, people will accept us for who we are, not what we look like.