Society should learn to embrace imperfection

If standards of beauty were to be followed, our everyday realities would look something like a poetic cliché. Our cheeks would match the tinted roses that line a garden in springtime, our skin would be as clear of imperfections and as uniform as porcelain and our appearance would never be allowed to differ from the ideal.

Below its shimmering surface, however, this version of perfection is painfully unrealistic and has many obscured examples of what it truly means to have a body. Regardless of what social media would have you think, no human being goes through life looking like a runway model at every given moment.

Our hair has its off days, our skin gets sunburned and our makeup sometimes seems better suited for a children’s coloring book.

And yet, in spite of this, we are still worthy of love and we should still be able to consider ourselves beautiful. Even the Greek gods and goddesses we sometimes compare each other to are not what our harsh standards would consider perfect; there is a beautiful statue of Aphrodite with belly rolls.

By enforcing unrealistic and unvaried standards of what it means to be beautiful, we are leaving no room for personal freedom and are invalidating the beauty of those who fall outside of these constraints. Beauty is not meant to be contained or defined by a single definition. Sometimes beauty is the way your partner laughs when you tell them how you danced to your favorite song in the shower. Sometimes beauty is a scar that reminds you of something you were strong enough to survive. Perhaps beauty is the way your crush’s birthmarks seem to spell out constellations on his skin.

Society discovered long ago that the picture-perfect covers of magazines were not realistic enough to strive for, but it never learned how to set them aside and rebuild them with something more truthful. The average person could easily spend his or her days refuting the perfect appearances of celebrities and still never question the rules that require them to appear that way. In this age of massive social change and awareness, it is time for us to also change the way we look at beauty.

While there is nothing wrong with a person fitting what is conventionally considered beautiful, this should not be the only example shown on a larger scale. This world is filled with all sorts of people, and each and every one of them is beautiful in their own way. Most importantly, each of them has their own flaws, and flaws are not something to be hidden away.

When we as a society learn to embrace imperfection and loosen our ideas of what is and is not beautiful, we will advance to a far more accepting, far happier future.

— Jesca De Lima

Roswell Daily Record