This has gone too far.

I am accustomed to seeing dozens of ads for a broad span of beauty and skin care needs: wrinkle removing, teeth whitening, skin brightening, eyebrow tattooing, body-hair lasering, various treatments for various afflictions, and that doesn’t even begin to include the makeup advertisements that regularly flash before the public's eyes via billboards, storefronts, phones and television screens across the world. I am accustomed to the specifications and qualifications of an ideal beauty, which are continuously changing, adjusting and evolving; always unattainable, but just barely so, keeping the population on a wild hunt for an ideal appearance that lacks concrete definition and guidelines, yet is always somehow judging what is and isn't beautiful. I myself am indeed entertained by the art in doing my makeup and I will always be an advocate for healthy skin care; however, I recently came across a website of tips and tricks to get rid of freckles, and frankly, I'm appalled.

I inherited my freckles- both sides of my lineage have polka-dotted skin, and i have never seen it as an issue. In fact, I love my freckles. Even when I was in middle school, and despised everything about myself, I never scorned the constellations that traversed my skin tone. Freckles, though different from the typical beauty standard of plain, bare cheeks, are not a flaw that should be erased.

The beauty industry has made its fortune by declaring unavoidable human characteristics as unappealing and needing to be ‘fixed’, but this mindset that observes naturally occurring elements as flaws is absurd, and its only getting worse. For years, wrinkles have been viewed as ugly symptoms of aging. Why are we so opposed to the inescapable reality that humans, just as any other living beings on this earth, get older, day by day? Why is the evidence that one has survived and experienced life viewed as an imperfection that should be hidden? And it’s not just freckles and wrinkles that are under disapproving scrutiny- body hair, tooth pigmentation, scars, birthmarks, random traits that no one has the power to decide to have or not, yet society has condemned them as blemishes to be corrected.

Why must we condemn any evidence that we are not clones of the same, uniform mold? Why do we not celebrate our so-called imperfections as the masterpieces that they are? It is these oddities that set us apart from each other, make us different, unique and beautiful. A piece of art loses its value if it's continuously copied-- there is nothing beautiful about a mass-copied print. The human race cannot fear the abnormalities that set us apart from one another, it's asinine.

My freckles, along with my dark arm hair, yellow-tinged teeth, and occasional scars, may be seen in the eyes of the public as ugly, but that is not only pointless, it’s also unimportant. Because no matter what the beauty industry says about my physical traits, they will remain to be mine. I get to decide how I wish to love myself, and I choose to love my body as it is. I despise the idea that one should change their own predisposed characteristics to conform to the cookie-cutter ideals of a superficial society. I despise the idea that one should change anything about their own person to please anyone but themselves. Who we are and how we see ourselves is of an underrated importance. Each and every individual is beautiful in their own way because life itself is beautiful. Each and every individual is flawed in their own way because life isn’t perfect. But mankind easily forgets the simple truth that one doesn’t need to be perfect to be beautiful, especially when the definition of such a description is as rapidly changing as the world it inhabits. In fact, true beauty develops from an acceptance of one’s self, an acceptance that, in turn, becomes a self-love that is blind to the judgments of a materialistically trivial world, growing to not only love oneself but to love one’s fellow co-existers as well.

"Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but any beholder that is foolish enough to berate naturally occurring attributes is not a beholder who should be allowed to determine the standards of modern-day beauty. "

I am learning to find this kind of acceptance within myself, and I challenge you to do the same.