It is without doubt that people desire physical beauty. But wisdom says that we should not define beauty by only what we see on the outside. It says that true beauty comes from the heart. If someone is pretty on the outside but has an ugly heart, then that person is equally not beautiful. But we are also told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What this implies is that beauty is relative. What may appear beautiful to one person may not necessarily be beautiful to another person. Beauty is whatever pleases you as an individual.
There are other intellectuals who have the idea that beauty is inconsequential. According to them, beauty does not solve anything, explain anything and it teaches us nothing. They feel like the whole debate about beauty is a waste of time and it should not even have a place in intellectual discourse. But it is so hard to agree with these intellectuals especially in the era we are living in right now. Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. The debates on what is beautiful and what is not are dominant on media platforms everywhere. Some people associate beauty with the color of the skin, some with the intellectual capability, some with the shape of the body and so on.
Even with endless campaigns to try and redefine what people term as beautiful, for instance the Say No To Racism Campaign, people have never stopped debating about beauty. Stories about people lightening their skin because they consider white to be beautiful are many. Some are not contend with the size of their lips, so they will go ahead to use lip enlargement procedures that will enable them to have fuller lips. Other people are going on crazy diets to lose weight so that they can achieve a slimmer figure since that is what they consider to be beautiful.
We cannot therefore turn a cold eye to beauty especially with many things that people are doing around the world in the name of wanting to be more beautiful. It will be like quelling a physical desire or responding with indifference to a cry from a baby. We can say that beauty is inconsequential, but what that really does is only widen the gap between the real world and our understanding of what beauty really is. People are doing extreme things in the name of beauty, some which literally put their lives at risk. You would think that their lives depended on it.
But we cannot judge the people that are investing so much of their resources to become more beautiful. Some of them are simply doing that to attain what the world assumes to be beautiful. We are always sizing up other people’s looks. The visible self of a person seems to be more important that the inner self in most cases. Even though it is in no way a fair assumption, that is what we have been made to think. The passionate pursuit of beauty reflects the workings of a basic instinct. That is why people always judge appearances as though an ideal beauty of the human form exists somewhere in their minds.