What makes someone beautiful? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to be beautiful is to be “highly pleasing to the sight; embodying an ideal of physical perfection; possessing exceptional harmony of form or color” (OED). In today’s society, with all of our access to various forms of social media, there are certain qualities we think a woman must possess to be considered beautiful. She must have large breasts, hips, and butt BUT also have a small waist. Sure, there are a handful of women who are made this way. But for most of us, it would take multiple surgeries to obtain these qualities. What has caused us to set the standard of beauty so high?

Is it social media? The thief stealing countless hours from our days; things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, blogs, and articles. We compare ourselves to models who have “perfect” bodies because we are shown these visions of perfection everywhere we turn. Due to our abundant access to these sites, apps, and images at all times, America has become desensitized. Now, I am not against social media or sites in the least, in fact, I am very active in all forms of social media and I write a blog. What I am against, however, is the way social media tends to portray beauty. Take Snapchat for example, there is a filter on Snapchat that the founder says “lighten[s] the user's skin and eyes,” and “contour[s] the face by making the chin and nose appear smaller” (Evan Spiegel). Most people do not think anything of this filter, they either use it or they do not, but they never stop to think about what it is doing. This is not the only example of the desensitization of our society.

We are given many tools to help us conform to the set standards of beauty, Snapchat and its filters isn't the only tool. We are given things like photoshop, tools once only used by those in the media to slightly change things about a model’s appearance are now in our hands. People say that things in the wrong hands may be misused, well, in this case, those people would be right. With photoshop in the hands of the common man, we change more than just small things. People will distort their entire bodies, changing everything about themselves, making them unrecognizable.

Responsibility for our desensitization cannot be placed merely on the tools we are given to “improve” our beauty but also to the sheer abundance of material we have in our hands. We mindlessly scroll through our news feeds every day and lay witness to photos of people, our friends or acquaintances, doing various activities. We have everything at our fingertips and there is no need for real interaction with the world around us. Let's say you have a friend who just had a baby, in the days before computers, cell phones, and social media apps, you would have had to go out and visit your friend to see her baby. However today, you would simply pull up Facebook and be able to see photos of the new bundle of joy posted all over your friend’s page. You might think "Wow, that is a beautiful baby". But if you were to meet the baby instead of seeing it on Facebook, its beauty would be more than just visual; it would be beautiful because it smelled good, and sounded sweet. Beauty used to be defined as anything appealing to the senses but now that we have social media, we do not need any sense other than sight to acknowledge the beauty of something. We have been desensitized.

Is our desensitization due to something other than just social media? Could it have some links to cosmetic surgery? Used to, one would have plastic surgery in order to fix something (i.e. they broke their nose and needed it fixed). Today, if you are unhappy with a part of your appearance you can have it fixed to your liking. These plastic surgeons are marketing off of our insecurities caused by the aforementioned visions of perfection thrown in our faces. We see a “perfect” woman in an ad or post on our news feeds and we ask ourselves how she got to be so beautiful. In an effort to reach the same level of beauty, we have surgeries to “fix” us. Deborah Harris-Moore, author of “Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection: Cosmetic Surgery, Weight Loss, and Beauty in Popular Culture,” talks about how beauty is a currency and always has been. She says “Beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make? Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our character, or are we stripping away our very identity? Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture?” (Harris-Moore)

We measure ourselves, not on how much we make or how big our houses are, but by how beautiful other people think we are. Our technological advances, more specifically social media, have allowed us to do so by shoving new standards of beauty down our throats everywhere we turn. We are so engulfed in the ideal of beauty that we have become desensitized to the world around us. Maybe it is time for a change. Maybe it is time for America to stop using beauty as currency. If we can change it now, the next generation of little girls suffering from things like PCOS (a syndrome I suffer from) will not have to look in the mirror and say I’m not beautiful because society says so.