Skylar Mullikin College Preparatory English Definition Essay October 24, 2016
Beauty Is Not A Look
According to Jacqueline Bisset, “Character contributes to beauty. It fortifies a woman as her youth fades. A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude, and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.” In contrast, society forces us to believe in order to be somebody in this world, a person must be beautiful on the outside. Society has shown people what they expect from them; however, this expectation is not real; over time beauty evolves. For a child, beauty is how you are treated, for a teen beauty is how you physically look and the objects they have, and beauty to an elder is how people treat them. In kindergarten, beauty was all about who kids played with on the playground. A person's last name, brand of clothes, or skin color were not factors. At the age of 6, all kids cared about was who brought the coolest objects for show and tell. Beauty is about who brought the best snacks on their birthday or who was nice when your buddy was not at school. In first grade, if a kid looked different or had special needs, or a different birthmark, they might get confronted and singled down but kids at that age do not really care what anyones name is, where they came from, or family struggles. First graders do not even care what the other kids wear and if it matches or not. I am a teen in high school. I am your average teen, with average friends, and an average life from what people think when they look at me. In high school, the peer pressure is to an extreme that kids go home and want to end their lives. Kids go home to cut and try to end the pain. Some students are on eating disorders because they feel as if they cannot live up to society's expectations as to how they should look or feel about themselves. This is not beauty. Me… I go home after practice to feel like I should look better. I stare in the mirror as I prepare to shower and I think of the body I “need” to have, compared to the body I do have. I go home to my twelve year old sister talking about how she does not feel pretty. “Weight is just a number. You are absolutely beautiful and anybody who fails to notice that should mean nothing to you,” I repeatedly tell her. I go to games and most of the starting players have their positions because of their last names or because of the contacts they have with the school, leaving some of the best players to never get a chance to play and to sit the bench for the entire game; this is high school. In high school, it is all about what clothes are being worn or how they are being worn. Kids judge by the way a person's hair is laying that day. Students worry more about who is sleeping with who than they worry about their homework. Students have to have the hottest brands, the coolest shoes, the same phone that the other kids have. Students want to go to parties, drink, do drugs, have sex, and it is all because of who they surround themselves with and because today, that is what students talk about. That is not beauty. As time goes on, the wrinkles start to form, and the elasticity in the skin is no longer there; a person is no longer considered young or beautiful. At the age of seventy, beauty goes back to what is within. Beauty is love. Beauty is who is still standing there at the end of the day and after all setbacks are thrown in their direction but could still look to the person they stood there for and say, “I’m still here.” That is beauty. Beauty is the kid who helped the old lady carry her groceries to her car even when she had not previously asked. According to the dictionary’s definition, beauty is, “The quality of being physically attractive.” To a teenager, this may be true, but this definition never lasts long. Over time, opinions change, but they do come back. At the end of the day, what matters are the surrounding people. What matters is not what was worn or what people did. At the end of the day, beauty is how a person feels about themselves and how they made others feel.