Five Lies Your Beauty Magazine Tells You

Today, I was inspired by this post by an old friend of mine, Jenni and her blog Story of My Life and her sweet guest post over at this blog Simply Sunshine and Daisy's. Be sure to visit both Jenni and Liv and leave a nice note! Jenni’s topic was beauty and she had some helpful tips for readers that had me thinking about my own experiences with beauty. The five things on this list are part of what I would call the lies of a cultural framework, a system that tells us that beauty is what we never are…perfect (Jenni summed this up in her post beautifully!) 

So here you are…lies, lies, lies…

1. Beauty is based on the negative. Too fat? Here are some diet plans. Too short? Wear these shoes. Whiten your teeth, erase cellulite, hide wrinkles, minimize pores, eat less, don’t wear that. Culture feeds on our insecurities as women (and it preys on the young).

2. Beauty contradicts itself. Be sexy but don’t sleep around. Be skinny but don’t starve yourself. Be tan but don’t get skin cancer. Be yourself but fake it if you don’t feel confident, successful, smart or beautiful.

3. Beauty is a commodity, up for sale if only we knew where to shop, what to wear, and who to listen to. Magazines, commercials, billboards, movies and television, even mannequins in the mall all deliver the same message, subtly, whispering just under the surface of our feminine consciousness, “You’re not good enough. No matter what you buy, no matter what you do…you will never be enough.” And even though we fight these thoughts in ourselves, tell ourselves that we are beautiful “just the way we are,” and read the pop-psychology article entitled, “Learn to Love Yourself” on p. 54. But we can’t help it when our eyes wander to the ads that sandwich it on either pages. Ads with pictures of impossibly thin, attractive, desirable women leading the lives we wish we led.

4. Beauty is the antithesis of the insecure. The connection we feel as women between our appearance and our confidence is inestimable. But feeling insecure is not wrong. We’re a product of our culture, after all. And if you’ve been told in a hundred ways, by a hundred people, that what you look like determines your right to opinions, feelings, desires, and success, you will probably crack under the weight of it all. You might even do what I did today at the hair salon when the stylist asked me a question. You might shift, embarrassed, apologetic in your chair, hating the fluorescent lighting for making you blotchy and the old sweats for making you look heavy and hating yourself. You can’t even meet her eyes as you mumble, “I just want to look pretty.” But being insecure doesn’t make you ugly. It just makes you human.

5. Beauty is external. This is the biggest lie and it pretty much sums up all the other ones. Beauty is not what you put on your face or in your body or comb through your hair or brush your teeth with. This is the lie we buy into, no matter what we say or feel about “true beauty” and “not judging a book by its cover.” We continue to obsess over ourselves as if squinting in the mirror might make that intangible quality appear. Real beauty comes from looking out at the world, concerning yourself with others. It is an act of selflessness.

"To see beauty is to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is. Beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. Why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?" –Crimethinc

Picture credits:

http://www.dietsinreview.com/diet_column/02/wordless-wednesday-skewed-body-image/

http://knol.google.com/k/real-beauty-magazine-liposuction-is-it-for-you#

http://www.imogene.org/blog/2008/06/06/friday/

http://discoverthejourney.net/2009/04/20/how-your-insecurities-can-hurt-others/