In The Eye Of the Beholder

Being young is wonderful -- perfect teeth, perfect hair, and a lot of other perks that go along with being young. Tight skin with a healthy glow tops flabby and out of shape in the minds of many. I was astonished when a young friend of mine told me about her normal routine after work. She was a Chinese-American who grew up in the Far East, and had a slightly different take on life than the rest of us. She, along with her brothers and sisters, gathered around their grandmother’s bed each evening and talked about their day.

“She is so beautiful,” she told me with a sense of pride. Digging in her billfold, she produced a picture and handed it to me. Her grandmother was a diminutive woman with an over-abundance of wrinkles. It wasn’t one of those things -- she is beautiful inside. My friend actually thought that her grandmother’s features were attractive. Quite a contrast between the way her family viewed the elderly, and our ‘throw away’ attitude of everyone past twenty-five when the first wrinkles appear.

In our society, we don’t need more anti-aging products. Instead, we need to adjust our attitudes and realize there are no throw away people. We have been sold on perfection and programmed to believe that anything less is a terrible plight that should be avoided at all cost. Wrinkles and stretch marks are there for a reason. They are milestones of our various struggles and victories. Beauty, in the sense of what we hold to be true in western society, is a fleeting illusion. We need to accept the reality of what nature has given to us and learn to be comfortable in our own skin.