We are often told growing up that beauty is not skin deep. True beauty supposedly comes from the inside, or from our personalities and characters. However, it’s hard to not ask, “Is beauty skin deep?” Our life experiences often tell us that beauty is indeed only skin deep. And furthermore, our culture says that it’s all that matters in life – how beautiful you are, that is. This is especially true for women, but also true for men as well.
“Is beauty skin deep?” is something we should be asking ourselves every day. Since I was a child, I have asked my parents this. My mother, in all her sweetness, told me that beauty is skin deep only in the aesthetic sense. And of course, beauty is subjective between every person. What I find physically attractive in a person, someone else won’t. This pacified me as I went through puberty. But when I grew up and went to college, I discovered that life isn’t that easy.
I was surrounded by people who kissed up to professors. I was okay with this, as it is human nature to do that sort of thing. Many of the people doing this were conventionally attractive. I thought that these people wouldn’t get very far – that my professors would be able to see through their beauty and see that inside, they weren’t so beautiful. These were people who wanted to cheat the system for less work and better grades. But to my horror, most of my professors bought it! And that meant those of us were not so conventionally attractive had to do all of the work, for the second round of grades.
Now, I am not one of those people who believe that everyone who is physically attractive cannot be beautiful on the inside too. Indeed, there are many wonderful people who are blessed with kind hearts and beautiful skin and hair. But I believe they are kind of rare. After all, children who are considered good looking are quickly taught that they do not have to be beautiful inside to get far in life.
I wish I could say that the world corrected itself as I got older and entered the workforce, but reality could not have been further from the truth. Time and again it was proven to me that people fully believe that the answer to, “Is beauty skin deep?” is “Yes.” All we care about as a society is that people who are good looking be given everything they could want in life. It’s takes away from motivation if you are not the most attractive person in the world.
But I believe that we can change. It will take a lot of change and we will have to teach our children over again, but one day we may have a society that teaches our young people that beauty doesn’t have to just be skin deep. We should strive to be beautiful on the inside as well, which means being kind, caring individuals.