Beauty? Essay, Research Paper

The public’s perception of beauty greatly differs from what it has been taught. Most people are taught to look at inner beauty, but we are constantly bombarded with images of things that are externally beautiful. So how can we be expected to look at the inner beauty of a person, when we see so much external beauty every day?

“Pleasing to the eye; felicity, especially of appearance; graceful or balanced structure; aesthetic perfection.”(Webster’s Dictionary) These are the definitions Webster gives for the word beauty. But most people are taught that it is so much more. Inner beauty, it is said, is what we should be looking for in a partner. How often can we say that this is true?

Children start becoming judgmental of physical beauty at an extremely young age. When in school kids are always fighting to be included with the people that make up the “in crowd.” Typically these groups of popularity are the beautiful people and they shun anyone who doesn’t match up to the standard of beauty that they have set. Children in school are constantly having their parents buy them expensive clothes in order to be accepted to the “in crowd.” Before we realize it has happened, we no longer strive to look for the inner beauty of someone. We begin to focus on an individual’s physical beauty. Because of this focus on physical beauty we have a society that caters to the extremely beautiful, long before they think about someone who may not be the model of beauty.

The media does not help this situation at all. We have television that constantly portrays beautiful people in the shows and in almost every commercial between the shows. It is almost exactly the same with magazines. The media is and probably always will, unless something drastic changes it, be the biggest pusher of beautiful model type people. One of the most popular things for teenagers and young adults to do, is to become a model. There are so many models out there that portray a look of extreme external beauty that we can not avoid seeing it somewhere in our everyday lives.

Even though we have been taught and should know not to focus on someone’s physical beauty it is virtually impossible to change the way we, as a society, view it. We have very critical and judgmental minds and we constantly look at people’s appearances and judge them on how we think they should look. It is hard to change the way we are, because the physical beauty is the first thing you see when you meet someone. We are constantly thinking of how people match up to our version of the perfect woman, or the perfect man. We see someone who maybe isn’t gifted with beauty as much as someone else and you automatically would rather talk to the person with exceptional beauty. The person you have passed over in your mind might be one of the most considerate people you have ever met and have the most inner beauty of anyone. You probably won’t find out because you have already judged the outside appearance and decided to pass them by.

People spend extreme amounts of money to look good. Millions of people have had some sort of plastic surgery in one form or another. They look at what catches the eye of the majority of society and strive to look like that. They want to be noticed just like the extremely beautiful models and popular people.

I would now like to state my feelings on this subject. I feel that there is a big problem in our society today and that this focus on external beauty has a lot to do with it. I have to admit I find myself doing it most of the time. I try to control it, but after being raised in a world that has so many lucrative images and beautiful people all around, it is hard to keep from focusing on it and taking notice of the not so “attention grabbing” people. I believe that our society is too biased in who they portray as the stars. All of the stars and popular peer images are very beautiful people and it pollutes our way of thinking. We think that we have to look a certain way to get anywhere in life. Really nothing changes when we go to school. We try as hard as we can to be accepted when we graduate and go to college it stays the same. After we graduate from college we still strive to be accepted. The way we look probably really does have something to do with how we are promoted in the business world. It just goes to show how far we have gone in degrading our society. The only way we can begin to fix this situation is to stop all the beauty that is in the media and no-body wants to do that. So, as I stated before, it is virtually impossible to fix this situation. Maybe if we keep informing the society about what is causing a lot of our problems today we can make a little bit of change. It would not be easy but hey, what is these days??