According to recent studies, individuals in the United States are exposed to over 5,000 different advertisements in one day. Obviously, that is quite a large number of ads, and many of them are geared toward young women to sell beauty and fashion products. Such advertisements often feature women who are what we perceive to be the epitome of perfection, and we are taught to aspire to be like a nameless face on a billboard. Unfortunately, the result of this kind of pressure can negatively affect your self-esteem, and you are left wondering how you can fix your flaws to truly become “beautiful.”

Throughout my life, I have been constantly bombarded by images of what I, as a woman, should look like. From a young age, I learned what parts of me were not universally attractive. It wasn’t like I thought that I was ugly, per se -- I have always been comfortable in my own skin, but I knew there were aspects of my appearance that were not considered to be beautiful. My brown eyes and brown hair were average at best. My eyebrows were too bushy and I had too much hair covering my arms. More than anything, I used to always be self-conscious of my nose for it stuck out in all of the wrong places and made me avoid pictures like the plague.

Since I was born, there has always been someone, whether it’s an advertisement or a character in a TV show, telling me what I should want, what I shouldn’t want, what I should wear or how I should fix myself. Makeup advertisements tell us to be natural, and in the same breath say that we can “improve” our natural selves with their product. While I am a relatively confident person and such pressure does not extremely affect my perception of myself, what about the millions of other women in the world who aren’t so sure of themselves, and are faced with thousands of ways to look prettier or more beautiful as if they weren’t already?

Society’s standards of beauty are narrow-minded and Westernized. Features that are considered beautiful in other countries are seen as flaws in the United States, even in the 21^st century. This Eurocentric view of beauty that has taken over our culture is detrimental to those who don’t fit into that ideal — and not many of us do fit into it.

Our skin has to be dark, but not too dark. Our eyebrows have to be thick, but not too thick. We have to have figures with curves in all of the right places, but we can’t be too chubby. Living with this kind of pressure is like walking a tightrope where one wrong step can ruin us. They tell us to get our eyebrows plucked, our hair dyed, our skin tanned, change ourselves until we barely even recognize our own faces, and for what? To fit in with some subjective idea of beauty?

I said earlier that I was always insecure of my nose. Now, I realize that it’s not something that I need to look down on. I have a nose that was passed down to me by my father, and his entire family. It reflects the Mexican heritage and culture of my ancestors that culminated into my very existence, why should I see that as a negative thing?

In a society that profits off of our insecurities, it is important to accept yourself, “flaws” and all. You might hate that mole right under your eye or the dimples in your cheeks when you smile, but nobody else has that exact mole or those exact dimples, do they? When we stop listening to what others tell us “beautiful” looks like and live our lives the way that we want to, we will start to see the beauty in ourselves.

We need to learn to love ourselves in a world that doesn’t want us to, and to embrace the parts of us that make us different. Our differences are what make us unique, and being unique is what makes us human.