Be REAL

I don't need to say much.

Elle France, February issue.

Tara Lynn.

Everyone that knows me for more than 1 month, knows that I'm eternally on a diet. Since my 16s, I've been saying it over and over again.

No I don't want this, I wanna lose 20 pounds..blah, blah, blah..

I bet you've had those days. The so-called fat days. I've bet you've wished you were taller, skinnier, had blonde hair, or green eyes or had sleek hair or just 'normal' or just 'beautiful'.

But what is 'normal'? What is 'beautiful'?

I've had this discussion with a friend holding on magazine in one  hand and a diet Coke in the other.

In which me myself was debating whether or not the model employed by Dove was 'beautiful' or not.

Now,  not to brag but we even get to discuss this based on recent academic research that analyzes the latest strategy of Dove. We are still marketers. We still need to know what works.

However who gets the right to define what is considered 'beautiful'? Who gets to say what is normal?

Do designers get to tell me I'm beautiful or not? Do my parents get that right?  Or does my boyfriend get to do that? And if they get to that, what do we define as beautiful?

Go ahead. Google.

A whopping total of 188.000.000 hits for the definition of beautiful. Take the first hit. Dictionary.com says: "Having beauty; having qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, think about, etc.; delighting the senses or mind: a beautiful dress; a beautiful speech."

For we fool ourselves to believe there are only a given number of qualities that give great satisfaction to see, hear etc. Why are we obsessed with binding beauty or the term beautiful to a given standard the majority of us women do not meet? Why do we allow others to judge us upon something that is as elusive and vague, as alchemy?

In my opinion women should just scrap the thought of not being beautiful and start defining their beauty based on a Likert scale. Ow, you don't know what that is? No worries, I will show you.

But first, you need to do me a favor. Close your eyes. Think about one time you looked in the mirror.

Now think, I (might) delight the senses or the mind.

Now open your eyes and indicate to which degree you consider yourself beautiful;

Beautiful                                                             Beautiful

1       2       3       4       5       6       7       8       9

Oh, you have academic knowledge, and you want to state that my scale is totally wrong because I don't measure anything in particular and there is no actual scale?

I shall totally agree with you. However I find that each and every single one of us should allow ourselves to acknowledge our own beauty. Who said we all had to look like models, actress or singers?