Beauty

The other night at work I came across a book called Wise Women. It was a photographic essay of older women and what made them beautiful, and their life experiences. I was struck by the woman on the cover and how beautiful she was so I flipped through it on my way to put it back in the section. Each picture was accompanied by a quote from a family member or the woman herself about aging and the many life experiences they had. The rest of my shift I kept thinking about this book, about the women in it, and about what beauty means in society today, and has meant in the past. I hate using terms like "nowa days" or "these days" but I'm going to. Now days there is so much pressure on remaining young, on looking 20 when you are really 40, on being a size 4 instead of a 10. On wearing Coach instead of Kohl's. Personally I don't think any of that makes someone beautiful. When I see an older woman who clearly has had a lot of cosmetic work done, whether its botox or face lifts or or breast "augmentation", dressed in a matching Juicy sweatsuit or a Forever21 dress, I can't help feeling sad for her. What's wrong with a few wrinkles? You don't gain laugh lines without laughing, and for every frown that contributed to a wrinkle you still learned something, experienced life. Every cosmetic company in the worl is pushing their own "Age Defying" line of skin care. Why do we have to defy age? Why can't we embrace it? As we age, we live. We meet new people, we learn new things, we laugh, we love, we cry and we struggle. I think the most beautiful women are the ones who embrace their beauty and age gracefully and elegantly.

Everyone has heard the old adage "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". The reason it is so commonly heard and referred to is because its true. Yes, there are certain things that are generally agreed upon as being beautiful, but every culture has its own ideas of beauty, as does every individual. Skinny or voluptuous, dark or fair, brown eyes or green, a woman is beautiful. The hardest part about it is discovering that for oneself. Especially if you don't fit the cultural standards for beauty. it's not easy being a size 12 when pretty much every other girl you know or see is a size 4 or 6. When you are bombarded from every direction with pictures of tiny women you can't help but wonder why you don't look like that in a bikini, but then I would remember its because I said "yes, I do want some ice cream" and I had a wonderful tiem walking by the river eating ice cream, and because tri tip is delicious and every time I eat it I think of family barbeques in the summer, and because warm chocolate chips always taste amazing, and because sometimes a cheeseburger is exactly what I crave, because food is part of life and if the way I enjoy life makes me a curvy 12 or 14 then I'm ok with never being on the cover of a magazine. That doesn't stop me from sighing with envy when I see a flat stomach and perfectly toned thighs on the cover of a magazine, and it also doesn't stop me from eating ice cream by the river.

My point is that I think the true meaning of beauty is being buried under specific expectations. The definitions I found for beauty say that it is a characteristic in a person or object that creates a feeling of pleasure, satisfaction or deep meaning. Nowhere does it say that beauty is starving your body of nutrients to fit into the "right" size, or that beauty is carving up your face to make it more symmetrical, or chemically burning off a layer or 10 of skin to look a few years younger. Chemically peeling off layers of skin canNOT give you feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. I guess, naively, I just wish that people would find beauty in everything, that they could look at someone and find something beautiful about them, that women wouldn't feel pressure to so drastically alter themselves to please other people, that you could look at someone covered in tattoos and wonder what story they tell and what meaning they hold to that person, that anyone would look at a woman with grey hair and a few wrinkles and think how beautiful she is, and the life she has led and the wonderful stories she must had and how much love she has known and given, that any given woman would know how beautiful she is at any given moment. I know. It's a little far fetched.