This generation of girls is totally fixated on one thing: outer appearance. We live in the day and age of contouring and crop tops. We spend hundreds of dollars on the latest beauty products that promise to totally alter what we really look like. We could care less about what our hearts look like, as long as our makeup looks good and our hair isn't a mess.
This isn't our fault; we have grown up this way. I can remember being five years old and listening to Britney Spears' "Oops! I Did It Again" album. She was my absolute favorite as this age, I couldn't tell you why. She sang about promiscuity and dressed to fit the part. Yet, she was my role model.
I don't want anyone to take this as me saying girls aren't allowed to do this, and that the way we dress determines our worth. But from a young age, we are exposed to this. I can't tell you how much of a struggle I have had with my outward appearance growing up, and the struggle I continue to have. It is, and was, always about having the nicest clothes, nice hair and a pretty face. It was always looking like how society said I should look. It was comparing myself to the models in the magazines.
I work at a before and after school center for school-aged kids. I have girls in the third grade already wearing mascara and learning the meaning of "twerk." It seems to me like we are teaching girls how to be outwardly attractive and to care more about how our bodies look, rather than how kind we are, or how smart we are, or our special talents.
Don't get me wrong, it's okay to care about our looks! We all do, to some extent. But that's not the only thing we should be focusing on. Beauty is much deeper than that.
We have to realize, as females, we are much more to offer than our faces and our bodies. We are a mind; We are a soul. We have depth, opinions and feelings. We have ideas; we have the ability to do anything we put our minds to. But instead, we are brainwashed to worry about how our makeup looks, how thin we are and whether or not we are good-looking enough to attract enough male attention.
But 40 years down the line, our looks are going to dwindle. We aren't going to have smooth, flawless skin. Our bodies aren't going to be the same as they were in our twenties. We are going to have to rely on more than what we look like to impress people.
Yes, it's true that beauty is defined as something aesthetically pleasing. But there is also another definition of beauty that is forgotten.
Beauty: a combination of qualities that pleases the intellectual and moral sense.
Beauty is more than skin-deep. It's about how we treat people, the passion in our eyes when we do something we love and the endless amount of love we have to give. It's about how we, as females, can do remarkable things. (Ahem, grow a human inside of us?!?) We have so much more to offer than our physical appearance. It's time to break into our potential.
