Many strive for unimaginable and inevitably unattainable beauty. It is the desire to be like those who capture hearts, minds and emotions with just a simple smile. This type of beauty pushes others to live up to society’s fearfully unrealistic expectations spread across the pages of magazines, plastered on advertisements and billboards, and acted out on the silver screen. As time progresses, the standard for beauty changes. What doesn’t change, despite time passing by, is that desire to attain perfection.

Tall, dark and handsome.

Skinny, yet curvy in all of the right places.

Blonde hair and blue eyes.

A cut stomach with washboard abs.

The ideal C-cup.

But living in the age of ugly beauty, when the morals of physically attractive individuals is questioned, beauty becomes equal parts flesh and imagination: it is a farfetched, star-crossed idea of a dream, mingling with one’s longings. The perception of what beauty seems to be masks the reality of fearing one’s reflection. Beauty is whatever pleases us. But defined this way, beauty is meaningless.

Scientists worldwide produce research that forces the masses to feel as though outward beauty is insignificant. Since beauty explains little, solves minimal and teaches us nothing, the topic itself should be excluded from a supposedly academic conversation. Because of it we’re supposed to stop, feel less anxious and breathe a sigh of relief. Beauty itself, after all, is an embarrassment.

But the thing that is wrong with this picture is that nobody has stopped looking at it nor stopped enjoying the sight of beauty. They can say that beauty is dead, but all that does is prolong the inevitable. Appearance is the most public part of the self. It’s the part that the world assumes is a reflection of the inside. This assumption at times is not fair, but that does not make it any less true. We cannot deny the consequences to subscribing to this ideal form of beauty. We see beauty as an opportunity to bend the rules and break the laws of attraction.In the real world, the beauty theory undoubtedly collides with reality.

“I think that because of the way the media and advertisements have portrayed men and women is a hard standard to live up to,” junior Ashley Stephens said. “There are so many edits and changes that they make to the models, and when people look at them they expect to be able to live up to these expectations. People try to change to be something unrealistic.”

But what is beauty? No definition can capture it’s true meaning. The dictionaries define beauty as something essential to the object (its color, form, etc.) or simply as the pleasure an object evokes from the beholder. Beauty came to reside not in objects, but in the eyes that viewed those objects and established them as beautiful. Although the ultimate definition of beauty is still being debated, the experience of beauty cannot be denied.

“In the society we live in, people always need to be the best at everything,” senior Jordan Jacob said. “They constantly need to have the best clothes, the best car, the best house and every other materialistic thing that you could think of. It goes the same way for beauty and body image. People need to look the best and be the best 24/7.”

The perfect human being, constructed like Frankenstein’s monster, is built by collecting only the best parts. The parts that society identifies as the most important, the most desired, the most admired and the most voluptuous. As a society, we break down each of these parts critically and destroy any semblance of uniqueness and originality. But what truly is originality? Is it the opportunity to be oneself completely? Or is it the chance to showcase the best of oneself? Or have we sacrificed originality in an effort to sustain the laws of attraction?
The media has raised our standards to an all time high, but some might say that this fake, often edited image we expect others and ourselves to live up to is a twisted version of beautiful. This picture of twisted beauty, the picture we perceive beauty to be, distracts us from reality; no one can be that perfect.