Does Beauty have only one Face?

By Angie Parada Suárez (undergraduate FIGRI student)

Nowadays, the concept of beauty has managed to become a major topic, not only for teenagers and for kids, but also for grown-ups. However, wanting to be beautiful is not the problem. The problem is when we believe beauty has only one face and then issues such as racism, anorexia and bulimia start to arise in society.

Sometimes it is difficult for many people to understand that we are different in so many ways, not only physically but also mentally. For example, some people may love romantic music, but others enjoy rock music more. Also, if we talk about beliefs, religions appear to be a really important part of our lives, or maybe if we talk about food, some of us love meat, while others may love a different type of food, such as vegetarians, for example. What’s important about all this is that those specific things may greatly influence the way we want to be or the way we want to look.

In modern society, people have created an illusion about perfect beauty, that in some ways shows us beauty as a specific type of person. For example, the first thing that comes to mind when we think of a beautiful girl or handsome guy is a perfect body, nice hair, slim, tanned, toned muscles and blue eyes. When it comes to reality, however, we see fat women with curly hair and brown eyes, or teenagers who claim to be emos, punks or even rappers. So, according to the modern concept of beauty, are these people ugly? What I don’t understand is how people can be so stubborn about perfect beauty, as if it was some kind of shirt that should fit everybody.

In my opinion, beauty has become a bigger issue than it should be. However, what is interesting is that nobody seems to care. They are all so busy trying to be beautiful that they don’t even realise that they are already are. It is really sad to find girls and boys of all ages having different types of eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, just because the media and society in general, shows beauty as models with such thin bodies that you can count their bones, one by one.

Most of these problems start with regular diets that, if we are honest to ourselves, we all do, but then people become obsessive and start controlling everything about what and how much they eat. People become insecure; they don’t like the way they look and in most cases they start feeling rejected. Beauty has become so radical, that even being born with a different skin tone has become a sin. I mean that the concept of beauty is so twisted that you are not even allowed to be different from the rest, even if this is not something you can decide.

Thus, everybody should ask themselves if it is really worth it to become somebody else so they can be accepted in a society that doesn’t even know what real beauty is. Maybe it is time to open our minds to a new concept of beauty which starts with the beauty of being unique.