Girls Only
Hey, girls! This is just for you! Let's talk about beauty that's more than skin deep, identity (who you are as an individual), and modesty. You're a treasure, and you're worth more than you realize. Let’s look beyond the world for our validation and step into something deeper.
Ready?
Click here to read Rose Petals by Julie.
Beauty
By: Stephanie Duncan
Living in the city of Chicago, I am subjected to an ambush of the beauty industry’s marketing every day. In just a five minute walk from my apartment, I am exposed to billboards, taxi ads, bus stop signs, and full-size murals all campaigning for my attention with a different media message: this mascara will guarantee you a great date, these boots are winter must-haves, this dress will make a new you! But to a twenty-year-old college girl who knows she does not roll out of the sheets in the morning looking like a perfume model, these messages get translated a little differently. I see the media goddess, whose body is all tan and confidence and curve, or, everything that I am not, and all I hear is a roaring accusation: These are not your legs, this is not your skin, you will never have this hair, this body, this allure.
Apparently, I am not the only one who feels insecure at these images. A recent survey shows that 70% of women feel insecure, depressed and guilty after only three minutes of browsing through a fashion magazine . And even though I know there are whole departments dedicated to the digital and cosmetic perfecting of that magazine face and figure, it still makes me wonder what my own body is missing. It made me hate my freckles growing up, because all the leading ladies were summery bronze; it made me count calories at age thirteen because I was convinced my stomach needed to be flawlessly right-angle-flat. In my head, I know that the girl on the cover makes her paycheck by being posed and edited and made-up just so, yet it is hard not to play the deadly game of comparison.
The problem with the mass media for women is that it dares to confine the dynamic definition of beauty to one, narrow feminine ideal: she is tall, tan, thin, wasp-waisted, full-breasted and with a face to launch a thousand ships. There is no room for variety; instead, beauty is restricted to a set of immovable ideals. So even though the body type of the average American model only makes up 2% of the national population, her 5’11” height and 117 pound frame is projected to the rest of us as normative.
The Hollywood standard shoves beauty into a narrow category that causes women to limit themselves to come up to scratch. A restrictive media ideal results in restrictive cultural practices, so we limit ourselves through eating disorders that have reached epidemic proportions, cosmetic surgery that is used for saleable self-esteem and sexual compromise to the rising cultural expectation of the woman’s body as a mere pleasure device.
The media ideal is offensive to the female identity because it reduces our personhood to a specific brand, dress size, hair volume and skin tone. It degrades our sense of worth by validating only one facet of a multi-faceted woman: her body image. Her complex and unique personhood is oversimplified in the fact that only her body is acknowledged. The media icon, that glowing goddess of attraction, fragments our understanding of personhood because she only presents one part of the whole. Like a broken mirror, we only see a fraction of the true, complete image.
And this is where I, and many other women, protest. Women are whole beings; and true beauty is holistic. Rather than limiting the definition of beauty and so stifling it, the definition of beauty begs to be widened, so setting us free. True beauty recognizes that the narrow containment of “it-factor” attractiveness is an amateur understanding of a much grander, much more intricate splendor. Beauty is not one-dimensional, but found in personhood, in the many facets of a woman: emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual. Beauty is not found in the compartmentalization of these elements, but in the composition of all of our unique facets combined.
This kind of beauty, the kind of beauty that recognizes the wholeness of women, then expresses itself in freedom. The woman who knows true beauty is free to develop a self-worth that is based on an understanding of herself as a whole person, rather than a fragmented image. She is free to grow in healthy confidence rather than exhaust her energy racing to measure up to the media ideal. She is free from the comparison game, and she is free to empower others to discover their own beauty. She is free to enjoy life rather than retreat into a dissatisfying tangle of insecurities.
So how do we bridge the gap between fragmented thinking and holistic thinking? How do we make peace with our bodies in a culture that ever-insists we need to be younger, thinner, softer, curvier? We can start by choosing what voices we will listen to. As we sift through the conflicting messages about beauty from our culture, family, community, and peers, we can ask ourselves, what messages empower my self-esteem? And what messages injure how I view myself?
By separating the false voices from the true, we empower ourselves to choose our own standard of beauty. We do not have to let our value be dictated by the insistent media roar; we can choose for ourselves the voices to which we will listen. We do not need to spend our energy and our self-esteem trying to imitate a face and figure whose very career it is to sit pretty.
True beauty celebrates the wholeness of women and the radiant variety in which we express it, empowering us to make peace with our bodies as a distinctive and matchless part of our design. As we grow in our understanding of true beauty, let us rise above the media tricks and pressures and choose to celebrate the whole image, the whole person, that we see in the mirror.
Gallagher, B.J. Everything I need to Know I Learned from Other Women. York Beach, Maine: Cohari, 2002. p. 109.
Beauty Tips
Hair
When flat ironing your hair: Use a heat setting that is suitable for your hair type (usually found on the directions that come with your iron). Don't hold the flat iron for extra time on the ends of your hair strand. Your hair is actually more porous and more easily damaged toward the ends so just keep the iron moving and slide it all the way down. Using a heat protectant spray or cream before ironing will protect your hair as well.
When using a blowdryer, dry your hair almost all of the way just with your fingers, then go over the top with a round brush to smooth out frizziness and curl the ends.
Makeup
Make it a point every night to wash your make up off. Its not good for the dirt and oil that builds up during the day to stay on your face . . . and it feels better!
If you don't have time to go all out with your makeup in the morning, just grab some blush, mascara, and lip gloss!
Dress
Keep the four B's in mind. If your clothing is showing any Back, Belly, Butt, or Boobs, you're best off without it! If you have to pull it up, push it down, fix it, adjust it, or check it, it's probably no good. Stick with modest clothing. Your mystery is beautiful.
Dress up your look with a pair of high heels, a piece of jewelry, or a belt. It will completely change your outfit, and add style!
Appointment With Love
S.I. Kishor
John Blanchard stood up from the bench, straightened his Army uniform, and studied the crowd of people making their way through Grand Central Station. He looked for the girl whose heart he knew, but whose face he didn't, the girl with the rose.
His interest in her had begun thirteen months before in a Florida library. Taking a book off the shelf he found himself intrigued, not with the words of the book, but with the notes penciled in the margin. The soft handwriting reflected a thoughtful soul and insightful mind.
In the front of the book, he discovered the previous owner's name, Miss Hollis Maynell. With time and effort he located her address. She now lived in New York City.
He wrote her a letter introducing himself and inviting her to correspond. Soon after he was shipped overseas for service in World War II.
During the next year and one month the two grew to know each other through the mail. Each letter was a seed falling on a fertile heart. A romance was budding. Blanchard requested a photograph, but she refused. She felt that if he really cared, it wouldn't matter what she looked like.
When the day finally came for him to return from Europe, they scheduled their first meeting - 7:00 PM at the Grand Central Station in New York. "You'll recognize me," she wrote, "by the red rose I'll be wearing on my lapel."
So at 7:00 he was in the station looking for a girl whose heart he loved, but whose face he'd never seen. I'll let Mr. Blanchard tell you what happened:
A young woman was coming toward me, her figure long and slim. Her blonde hair lay back in curls from her delicate ears; her eyes were blue as flowers. Her lips and chin had a gentle firmness, and in her pale green suit she was like springtime come alive. I started toward her, entirely forgetting to notice that she was not wearing a rose. As I moved, a small, provocative smile curved her lips. "Going my way, sailor?" she murmured.
Almost uncontrollably I made one step closer to her, and then I saw Hollis Maynell. She was standing almost directly behind the girl. A woman well past 40, she had graying hair tucked under a worn hat. She was more than plump, her thick-ankled feet thrust into low-heeled shoes. The girl in the green suit was walking quickly away. I felt as though I was split in two, so keen was my desire to follow her, and yet so deep my longing for the woman whose spirit had truly companioned me and upheld my own. And there she stood. Her pale, plump face was gentle and sensible, her gray eyes had a warm and kindly twinkle. I did not hesitate. My fingers gripped the small worn blue leather copy of the book that was to identify me to her.
This would not be love, but it would be something precious, something perhaps even better than love, a friendship for which I had been and must ever be grateful. I squared my shoulders and saluted and held out the book to the woman, even though while I spoke I felt choked by the bitterness of my disappointment. "I'm Lieutenant John Blanchard, and you must be Miss Maynell. I am so glad you could meet me; may I take you to dinner?"
The woman's face broadened into a tolerant smile. "I don't know what this is about, son," she answered, "but the young lady in the green suit who just went by, she begged me to wear this rose on my coat. And she said that if you were to ask me out to dinner, I should go and tell you that she is waiting for you in the big restaurant across the street. She said it was some kind of test!"
Quotation
"To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women." ~ Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
