"Beauty is only skin deep"

September 21, 2013.  4-5:30 PM.

Today I finished my photoshop image that I had started in class.  

I'm actually surprised at how nice it looks.  At first I was befuddled, completely unsure of how to approach this assignment.  Because my adage is "beauty is only skin deep", I at first wanted to find images of hilariously ugly people--the kind of people we laugh at in cartoons because they are so unrealistically strange looking.  I wanted to juxtapose that against the x-ray full of flowers, to show how physical ugliness has nothing to do with the soul.  But after I did that, it looked really cheesy.  I wanted it to be more serious, so I googled "burn victims" and found a different face to place in the image.  It looks a thousand times better!  

And the fact that the person is a burn victim adds to the depth.  Burned faces are often horrifying, being marred and unnatural.  Realistically, it's hard for most people to find the beauty in that.  We cannot really say that everyone is pretty because some people are just terrifying.  They are hideous.

That's my problem with the new body acceptance movement: it assumes that everyone is gorgeous, no matter what.  But the truth is beauty is completely subjective, and fades fast.  So instead of focusing on outward beauty, which really means nothing in the end, why don't we start focusing on inner beauty, which is far more valuable and useful to society