What makes someone beautiful? Is it the woman with sea-green eyes with the dark hair or the woman with freckles on her face wearing glasses? Some foreign cultures believe beauty should be private, forcing women to wear long lehanga choli and veils over their faces. In other cultures, it is attractive to wear little or no clothing at all. In the end, beauty is based on our society and the way we are raised. Our culture teaches us different ideas about physical beauty, but how does this really affect our mental and physical behaviors in the end?
In the Webster’s Dictionary beauty is defined as “the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind.” Nowhere in that definition does it say that beauty has to be a certain way. Yet, here in America, beauty is portrayed as being a size two with smooth poreless skin and white straight teeth. If people are anything but “perfect” we are considered to be an outcast in society. Hannah Lobel explained about a study published from the New England Journal of Medicine which “found that obesity can “spread” among social networks” (55). Reading this article sent many people into an up-roar with questions such as “Can you catch obesity” (Lobel 55) and “Are your friends making you fat” (Lobel 55)? When society watches television or reads an article about weight, they become worried about themselves, or people are consumed with the obsession of losing weight.
When society sees the different beauty ads on billboards and in magazines, we tend to dwell on what we feel needs to be changed about ourselves, so that we meet the standards of everyone else. “We’re bombarded with images of the young, the skinny, the over-sexualized, the computer idealized. The effect on our self-image and self-esteem is even deeper than you might imagine” (Monroe 255). Witnessing the effects of beauty mentally, I was in my sixth grade English class. There was a new student who sat at the same table with two other girls besides me. The new girl was very shy and kept to herself most of the time. My own opinion of her was that she was just another average girl, but apparently others weren’t so kind. One of the girls who sat with us was one of my closest friends, who started to make fun of the new girl. This took me by total surprise because my friend, who had been bullied on how she looked and her weight, was bulling someone else. Taking in that moment when I saw the new girl portraying herself as, becoming quieter and then slumping over in her chair like she wanted to disappear, I took up for her. I looked my friend in the eye and asked her how she could sit there and bully her when she had been bullied many times before for her looks and weight. After that, our table was quiet for the rest of the period until the bell rang. When everyone was leaving,