It’s annoying to hear if you’re on the receiving end of it but it’s a cold hard fact: We can’t all be beautiful. In defense of the idea that we’re not beautiful many of us have challenged the definition of beauty. What is beauty anyway? Who decides what’s beautiful? And when we can’t get anywhere with that angle we start to talk about beauty being skin deep and how it’s what’s on the inside that counts. All of this is perfectly valid. What “is” beauty? Who does decide what’s beautiful? And since beauty fades why is it given such importance?

How do you feel about your looks?

Everybody wants to be beautiful. But by the standard definitions of beauty, most of us are not beautiful. When you want to be beautiful but you don’t look the way society says you should look to be classified beautiful, it can be very hard. You look at yourself in the mirror and you tear yourself apart. Your face isn’t shaped right. Your skin is rough. You have dark spots. You have acne. Your nose is too broad or it looks like a beak or it’s in some other way just not the definition of a perfect nose. Your mouth is too wide. Your lips are too thin. Your lips are too big. Your chin is shaped funny. You don’t have any cheekbones. Your cheeks look like you’re storing gumballs. Your eyes are too small. Your eyes are too big. Your eyebrows are thin. Your eye lashes are short. You have warts. You have moles. You have lines and wrinkles. There’s no end to the things that imperfect women who wish they were perfect (and some men as well) will trash themselves over and use as justification for hating what they see when they look in the mirror.

Beauty Matters

Let’s be honest. So much is made of being beautiful that it’s hard not to hate yourself when you look in the mirror and you see multiple imperfections. People do notice one way or another. And everybody wants to be noticed favorably. So it can be difficult when your list of imperfections is vast. It’s understandable that a person would be frustrated especially when they see people getting ahead in life just on their looks alone.

But hating yourself only makes matters worse

Everybody’s got something interesting about them. The problem is that you can’t convince everybody to see what’s interesting about you. Some people will see it and some people won’t. But if you’re going around hating yourself because you don’t look a certain way, that inner self-hate will show on the outside. And it will likely overshadow what is interesting about you. So when you look at yourself in the mirror remove the ideas in your head about what you should look like. Acknowledge what you see. If you have bad skin, start trying to improve your skin. That alone can do wonders. You weren’t born with bad skin. Your bad skin does not define you and more than likely you can do things to improve it. So do what you can to correct what can be corrected. And do what you can to enhance your looks. But never hate yourself because your face isn’t “pretty”. Because people who value you for having a pretty face don’t really value you at all. And the moment you lose your looks, which everyone inevitably does, they will lose interest in you. You’ll be worth nothing to them.

Photos copyright: michaeljung / 123RF Stock Photo