If someone tells you, “You look beautiful,” and your first thought is, “They’re just being nice,” perhaps the problem isn’t the compliment. Perhaps it lies in everything you have been taught, over the years, about who gets to be considered beautiful. Long before we ever look critically at ourselves in the mirror, we have already absorbed countless messages about which bodies are desirable, which features are attractive, how young a woman should look, and how closely we are expected to resemble a particular ideal. So much so that someone can look at us and genuinely find us beautiful, yet we may still trust a cultural standard that has never known us more than the person standing in front of us.
So who decided what beauty is supposed to look like? And how many of the things we dislike about ourselves are truly our own judgments, rather than things we were taught not to love? Perhaps beauty exists far beyond the places we have been taught to look for it. It may be in the nose that reminds you of your mother or grandmother, the lines that show how often you have laughed, grey hair, freckles, heritage, presence, and all the features that carry something of who you are and where you come from. Before trying once again to fit ourselves into someone else’s definition of beauty, perhaps there is a more revealing question to ask: if every beauty ideal you had ever encountered suddenly disappeared, would you still dislike the same things about yourself?
The full article was originally published on the Psychology Portal – Psychology.gr.