essay
If we meet Beyonce, a glamorous singer, we couldn’t help saying “She is so beautiful!” In a sense, many people seem to regard ‘beauty’ as a feeling from good looking. Whenever I watch TV, I can find really handsome guys and charming women easily. Social standards of beauty have also been changing over time. To be beautiful, many people go to see a plastic surgeon and spend lots of money for it.
What if one day, you lose your facial beauty? What if you get older and more wrinkled? At that time, could you tell yourself that you are still beautiful with self-confidence as the standard of beauty above? We would need other views about beauty.
The definition of the ‘beauty’ is the quality of being pleasing, especially to look at, or someone or something that gives great pleasure. I can’t find any words such as ‘handsome’, ‘appearance’, or something related to a face, in the definition. Of course, it mentions the pleasure of looking at, but it has different meaning.
The phrase, ‘The pleasure of looking at’, wouldn’t mean good appearance but something good from the heart. To explain further an example of beauty to me relates to my trip to Sweden. When I went to Sweden on August, I had no home to live because of lack of money.
However, one of my Swedish friends helped me so I could live with her mother, Sari, for two weeks until I got a house. Sari made me feel at home and helped me with no strings attached, even though she hadn’t ever seen me before. While I was living at her house, I felt that she was beautiful. I could feel warmth from inside of her, and also I experienced that the warmth was changed into her beauty not from her appearance.
My grandmother has only seven fingers. She lost three fingers by a severe disease when she was around 16 years old. To make matter worse, her husband left her. Whenever people see her unbalanced hands, they usually feel creepy. It could possibly remind them of one of the scary scenes from a horror movie. Nevertheless, she has endured hard times since her adolescence, brought up three children and me, and showed great love to them.
Whenever I meet her, I am really proud of her and I think she looks so beautiful even though people feel so scared. She is still working on her small farm with her functional seven fingers and radiating her old, silver-colored beauty in all directions. What do you think of that? Would you still be thinking that real beauty is from your attractive appearance? Let’s look at another example.
Three years ago, I caught hepatitis A and was sent immediately to the emergency room in a hospital. I was on my death bed, losing my eyesight and consciousness. After the prompt medical consultation and actions, I was moved to a common ward. My father visited me and he took care of me until I pulled round.
To be honest, I had been on bad terms with him, and I didn’t expect him to visit me and look after me. He showed me his blind love. He looked really beautiful at that time. You could also have had the same experience like me. When we are loved and cared for by somebody, we would think of them to be beautiful. Thus, it is easy to realize that a word or an action from the bottom of someone’s heart makes them look so beautiful. It is also obvious that real beauty is a mirror of one’s inside. It is something not to be added to ostentation, untruth, or deception.
In conclusion, I strongly suggest that real beauty is not the beauty of appearance but the one of the interior self. To look at the real beauty, we need to look deep into ourselves first. That’s why only the people who can know their own beauty of the inside can look at other’s real beauty.
There is a proverb, ‘Beauty is only skin deep’. It means that person’s character is more important than how they look. Therefore, you have already have real beauty… you are very invaluable and really beautiful. Don’t be discouraged by an unattractive face. Don’t envy sexy women or handsome guys. You will be more beautiful than them as long as you realize what real beauty is. Keep that in your mind!
Park Ji-hyun Dept. of Life Science ‘06
webmaster@uos.ac.kr