Why Beauty Matters

Where does the longing to be beautiful come from?  Every time period and every culture had some concept of a beauty ideal.  For example, during the Elizabethan era or 16th century England, women were inspired by Queen Elizabeth’s pale/powdered complexion and fiery red hair.  As a result the women painted their faces with ceruse (a.k.a lead paint) and wore red wigs as a fashion trend.  A more striking example of a painful beauty ideal is “foot binding” which was commonly practiced in China.  Believing that having tiny feet was an important expression of femininity women would literally bind their feet at times even restricting or breaking the arches of their feet in order to keep their feet from growing.  Yet another painful yet fascinating beauty ideal that comes to mind are “lip plates” which women from certain tribes in Africa and S.America wear to enhance their beauty.  For example, the Mursi and Surma women (nomadic tribes in E. Africa) would make an incision in their lower lip and insert a disc into the lip.  As time went on they would replace the disc with larger ones eventually going to a diameter of 10-15cm.

The fact of the matter is that beauty has always mattered to women and neither culture nor history has erased this innate longing that all women share.  The desire to be beautiful or to behold something beautiful is a transcendent longing and it is something that is deeply ingrained in every woman’s heart.  From the moment that God created us in His image and brought us into existence, He deposited into us His own beauty ideal - His moral excellence, His sense of relationship, and His sense of stewardship.  Beauty matters because beauty matters to God and in the end or in this case, in the beginning, He is the ultimate standard of beauty.  As a result, every woman carries an unanswered question in their hearts - am I beautiful?  I think the deeper layer to this question is am I who God intended me to be - fearless, safe, unashamed and whole?

Beauty is also a very culturally constructed ideal.  This is an unfortunate effect of the fall.  In our particular postmodern, western culture, the beauty ideal has mutated to the extent that nothing matters more than what’s on the outside.  It makes me wonder why of all the incredible aspects of femininity to focus on, why does it have to be so concentrated on what we represent on the outside?  Additionally, the current beauty ideal is not only incredibly superficial, but it is also increasingly sexually charged.  Consider the recent cover of Vanity Fair where Miley Cyrus, a preteen pop icon, posed semi nude.  A beautiful image to be sure and some would even consider it being a work of art, but what is most frightening about this picture is that it communicates to a very young, moldable and vulnerable generation of women that it’s completly ok to objectify oneself.  Sadly, many women buy into this form of self-imposed objectification without even being aware of it and at the heart of this particular matter lies the hearts of a generation of women who feel incredibly worthless and very much like the object they strive to be.

I’d like to continue to express in my later entries that this development of our current beauty ideal or more specifically, the distortion of God’s beauty ideal did not happen in a void.  There were movements and significant decisions that have been made in our history that have shaped the way in which women understand and appropriate this culturally entrenched beauty ideal into their lives.  Stay tuned!