When speaking about beauty, most often we find people seek the approval from others. We long for the days in which we hear a significant other or even just other people say, we are pretty or compliment some aspect of our appearance. It was what we were told was a great achievement to receive those compliments and that we should, in most cases, dress and put ourselves together just for these compliments.

But the greatest part of this wave of feminism is we found we do not actually need to do those things for others. The women of this society realized that no matter what comments were there that it was still fun to dress up and put really bomb make-up on.

The issue was that with this new found motivation—ourselves—for make-up and getting ready for the day was making other people, especially men, uncomfortable. One of the most obnoxious things we have to deal with is that people are mistaking confidence with our looks and full selves as being cocky and its own form of obnoxiousness.

This is the root of most issues with women and our self-image. We are told to achieve a certain level of beauty and to be confident in what you have but then once we have achieved that true self-confidence and actually say something about it, it becomes too much.

Self-confidence is the greatest thing we can achieve as women. When we have that confidence in ourselves it changes how we look at ourselves and how we are then able to go through our image. We should be able to say we love the way our hair looks or that our make-up is really what is making us feel confident today without someone then in return, saying that those statements which make us sound cocky.

Those statements are actually another thing that takes our confidence to another level. It takes a lot, unfortunately, in our society to say anything out loud that is affirming to our bodies and looks. The fact that for some reason we need approval of men or other people to say something nice about ourselves is ridiculous.

As women our kindness to ourselves and confidence that resides within us is something so much more precious and worthy of our time then another hollow comment from an outside party. Confidence and approval in our own appearance is so much more needed. We should be working with women and girls to strive for kindness and love for themselves first before finding it in other people- especially men.

As human beings, there is no requirement for outside approval to say nice things about ourselves. I’m sorry, but I do not need your permission to say I am beautiful and extra confident in this moment, thank you very much.