What Makes You Beautiful

Ever wondered what makes a woman beautiful? A lot of people use the word beautiful very casually, but not me, I choose to use it more judiciously. I feel for a woman to be called beautiful she needs to have a few qualities. A woman can be attractive, hot, sexy or pretty, but not beautiful.  

For a woman to qualify as beautiful she needs more than just a pretty face maybe not even a pretty face. She needs to have certain things in her character that takes her beyond the rest. A pretty face will make you smile, but a beautiful woman makes you happy. You can miss a pretty face, but a beautiful woman…you cannot live without. A beautiful woman will take the time to notice you, while a pretty face will work over time to get you and many others notice her. A pretty face is easy to notice, you see her, along with all the other strangers (nothing special), but a beautiful woman is noticed only by few and that makes her special. It makes you special too, for seeing something in her that no one else does. 

I do admit that pretty faces are easy to fall for, but in time, a pretty face is never why a relationship lasts, it’s the character of the person, her qualities that you fall in love with and also what makes her beautiful. Which brings us to a quote from my favourite poet John Keats, he famously wrote

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”

And Joseph Addison famously wrote:
“Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.” What Joseph Addison on the other hand meant by beauty here, is the pretty face I was talking about. 

So many young girls work so hard to look beautiful (as they would like to be seen) without knowing that beauty is only skin deep, and beautiful is them as a person, their personality, they way they carry themselves. I recently saw a documentary where Korean girls, go through painful cosmetic surgeries just too make their eyes look bigger. It doesn't stop there, all around the world girls go for breast implant, re-constructive cosmetic surgeries trying to have the perfect, eyes, nose, lips, face, feet etc.  oh and even the perfect ‘V’ (if you know what I mean). Yes there’s a cosmetic surgery even for that part of the female body. Botox, facelift…Where does it stop? I don’t know, and it’s disturbing. If you've seen ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ you’ll know what I mean. 

 “It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.”

ANNE BRONTE

On the flip side of things, I do remember a very pretty friend of mine crying to me one day. She said her beauty was a curse, because no one ever cared to look at who she was as a person. She cried about how she was tired about boys proposing to her all the time. I felt bad for her for a while till I asked her “What about your boyfriend?”, to which she replied “Oh…I don’t love him, I just keep him around to take me here and there, I want a guy to love me for who I am”.  She’s still single…