By Steve Wang

Beauty is a big part of life. It is one of the defining features of someone as our feelings on this topic shape us into who we are. Different things come to mind for different people when thinking about beauty. To me, beauty can be defined as anything that can give me a feeling that I enjoy. The feelings could be things like joy, excitement or, satisfaction.

One thing a lot of people will think about is the beauty of a person. In today's society, women are beautiful when they have a defined but slim hourglass figure combined with sharp looking features. Men are considered handsome/beautiful when they are not fat, have strong features and are not small in size. Most of these probably came from nature. People are programmed to try to have children with the fittest partner they can find (Cunningham, 2023). However, some of the features like having a slim body probably got exaggerated media like movies. If people look too far from these beauty standards, they might get bullied because they looked different from common shared standards. This starts from children making fun of people who are different from them. This can lead to the “ugly” person having low self-esteem and bad social skills which is a development that comes when children get bullied at a young age. That can lead to people easily misunderstanding their intentions and their personality. All that can cause people to dislike them which may cause them to have less opportunities in life. In contrast, someone beautiful from a young age may very possibly be well liked by teachers, other parents, and other students. This may cause them to have lots of recognition and approval from everyone from a young age which may cause them to have lots of confidence to try new things. Trying new things will help them get more opportunities. Paired with their likely above average social skills from talking to a lot of people since a young age, the person will be well liked. Here is an example of a beautiful and not so beautiful person. As a result of the mostly unrealistic or impossible feeling beauty standards of today, people have resulted to editing the way they look. Examples include things like surgery or injections. The most common method would be to edit photos before putting them on the internet. If I wanted to be a social media influencer, I might want to edit myself to look like this before posting.

Photo of the researcher's actual appearance

Photo of the researcher's edited appearance

To create the “new me”, I just through my photo through a sort of face editing beautifying app called PhotoApp. It feels like there has been this slight dreamy filter put on the whole photo. My skin has also been made lighter and smoother with the spots removed. Furthermore, my face especially my lips look more colorful in the new photo. All this editing has made me look substantially younger and slightly fake. When looking at this others may think I was 12 and already has some plastic surgery done. If I was offered the chance to look like that for no cost or trade off to me, I would choose not to because it would not fit my personality. I would look too fragile which does not match my brash personality. Plus, it feels unnatural. However if I was forcibly switched, I would probably find it kind of funny because I am not overly concerned about how people view me.

However, this also reminds me that a lot of what people think about someone comes from how they look because this is usually the first information others get about us. I would encourage people to not form these preconceived ideas about their personality from their looks because they could be very skilled and could be useful to you someday. For example, Hedy Lamarr, an actress and an inventor. She fit the beauty standards of the time well, and people often think that beautiful women are simply shallow and empty things that are nice to look at, but this would be a mistake to think that in Lamaars' case. During World War 2, she helped develop a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers (Wikipedia, 2024).

Hedy Lamarr (Wikipedia, 1944)

If one cannot disregard their assumptions about someone based on how they look, they should make it a smaller part of their criteria when judging someone.

In conclusion, people should try not to judge people based on their appearance. There can be beautiful people with great personalities who are also incredibly intelligent. In contrast, there could also be very beautiful people with terrible personalities and an intelligence of a goldfish to match. To use appearance as a big factor when judging someone will cause you to miss opportunities. However, people should still pay attention to other’s appearance because it can tell us a lot of information about them.

1. Wikipedia. (2024). Hedy Lamarr. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedy_Lamarr&oldid=1196884449

2. Wikipedia. (1944). File:Hedy Lamarr Publicity Photo for The Heavenly Body 1944.jpg—Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hedy_Lamarr_Publicity_Photo_for_The_Heavenly_Body_1944.jpg

3. Cunningham, C. (2023, November 23). Survival of the Fittest | Definition & Examples | Britannica. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/survival-of-the-fittest