You Are More Beautiful Than You Think

Posted by DJL on Apr 29, 2013 in Culture | 4 comments

Beauty, the say, is in the eye of the beholder. But while this is often used to capture our perplexity when someone else falls in love with someone or something we don’t similarly appreciate, it might also work in reverse. That is, we might have occasion to wonder why so many people have a hard time imagining they are beautiful.

Last year I posted Dove’s expose on what it takes to make the women in ads appear so strikingly – and as it turns out, unrealistically – beautiful. This spring they have followed up with another ad about the challenges women have in seeing themselves as beautiful.

The concept and outcome are both creative and arresting. They hired a police sketch artist who composed two portraits of several women. The first was based on the each woman’s description of herself (the sketch artist never saw the women he sketched); the second was based on the descriptions the women gave of each other. The results are rather amazing, as not only is the second picture far more realistic, it’s also, well, more beautiful.

It’s as if the women had a hard time focusing on anything other than their own perceived flaws, while others could see them more realistically and appreciatively.

Equally arresting was the impact on the women when they noticed the discrepancy between their self-image and how others perceived them. Once they noticed their own tendency to accentuate what they perceive (or somewhere along the line were told) are their flaws, they could begin to do something about it.

Three further notes: First, just as I was both skeptical and appreciative of Disney’s attempts to remake the image of “princess” for our daughters, so also I’m simultaneously skeptical and appreciative of Dove’s efforts. Dove is owned, after all, by Unilever, who makes plenty of products that are sold on the premise that women will be more beautiful and accepted if they purchase them (which presumes they are not beautiful enough on their own). Nevertheless, I will continue to applaud any effort to counter the pervasive and unrealistic standard of “perfect beauty” perpetuated so relentlessly by the culture and which has taken such a toll on women.

Second, truth be told, I think this issue of self-image is true of men as well. A few years ago, a gentleman at a conference I was speaking at mentioned that he’d been working out. He followed that up by saying that for the first time in his life he wasn’t ashamed of his body. Since then, when I’ve been talking about the “culture of lack” perpetuated by advertising, I’ve often asked people to raise their hands if they feel satisfied with their bodies and looks. It’s usually less than 1% of the people who raise their hands. But while this affects all of us, there is no question that women in particular have been pressured to find their sense of identity and self-worth in conforming to an ideal of beauty manufactured by others.

Finally, I want to be clear that I’m not against beauty – in women or men! I’m against holding up an artificial ideal that makes all of us ultimately feel rather awful about ourselves, and I want the church to find a way to articulate God’s love for each of us apart from beauty or brains or ability or anything else we hold up as a standard. Each of us, to God our creator, is beautiful. And I think we would do well to connect with someone in our lives soon, even today, and tell them that we think they’re beautiful, too.

Notes: 1) If you are receiving this post by email, you may need to click here to watch the video.
2) If you want to see more of the videos Dove made as part of this campaign, go to their “Real Beauty Sketches” site.
3) For a thoughtful response and appreciate critique that questions why we have to put so much emphasis on beauty in the first place, see  the blog Jazzy Little Drops. (And thanks to Christine for sending this link my way!)