Beauty is recognized throughout the world. There are so many ways to describe beauty, but in our society, we have learned that beauty is based off of external appearance. So what’s the problem with being beautiful? Absolutely nothing. But there is a problem with how we view beautiful people. Saying that someone is “perfect” or the “most beautiful” may be a compliment, but in our society, with all the idealistic body type and the idealistic definition of perfect facial features, those compliments can turn into the hatred of one’s self for not having those features.

Every positive reaction has an equal negative reaction. Person A may think that Person B is the most beautiful. Person C, hearing this, looks at themselves and wonders why they can’t look the same. Person B may say that Person C has the most perfect body. Person A, hearing this, diminishes their own self-worth because their body isn’t the same. A positive judgment of one person can boomerang back to a negative judgment toward someone else. Never look at a girl and say “she’s not even that pretty,” “she’s kind of fat,” or “she’s too muscular.” Putting us women into a box of a confined definition of beauty is suffocating to the other people around us.

This normality in our society can be very detrimental, especially to women’s mental health. Social media has influenced girls so much; girls wake up 2 hours early to straighten their naturally curly hair just to feel accepted by a judgmental society; deciding not to wear makeup for one day and someone asking you “are you sick? You don’t look well” can ruin a girl's entire day. Our society fails to realize the damage of praising beauty. When a man is speaking in a professional setting, not a word is said about his weight or white hairs. When a woman speaks in a professional setting, people just have to comment on how much of their legs they are showing, or whether their outfit was appropriate or not. Our society breeds the young girls of our society into people who can be narcissistic about their beauty, or hate themselves because of how they look. Our generation was raised with the social media generation, making us very vulnerable to the world. When you’re still a child, your brain is still in a fragile state of development, and we destroy them by telling them what they should and shouldn’t be.

Our society hypes beautiful models, but even when we have amazing role models like Emma Watson, an amazing actress and a United Nations ambassador, we still see people criticizing her appearance. Either she wears too much or she wears too little, as if what she wears is a reflection of who she is as a woman. We as women have so much more to offer than a pretty face and a nice body. An externally beautiful woman may have the ugliest exterior. With the blindness in our society by confining people into a box of a definition, it creates a superficial and almost unattainable view of beauty, manipulating people into believing that beauty is a powerful aspect of a woman.

This is a huge problem in our society these days. People worship a woman’s appearance and market the idealism for a woman’s body and face instead of looking at what truly makes someone beautiful. But what does make someone beautiful? External beauty is nice, but it doesn’t mean anything when you’re not a good person. If we extended our peripherals on beauty and focused more on the internal aspects, we would learn to call someone beautiful for things that actually matter. Something that lasts. External beauty has an expiration date, but kindness or a genuine heart goes a lot further, and it never dies.