Decoding The Word 'Beautiful'

We all have different perceptions of the word “beautiful”. For example, when we see something up in the sky, like a saffron sunset sky or a rainbow; we would like to share it with others. When we see a plain white dog with fluffy fur and radiant buttony eyes, we would like to adopt it. On the other hand, when we see a road full of traffic jam because of rainshowers, does that include in this list of being beautiful?

Therefore, beauty to us is dependent on our external environment in one way. So, is this one of the reasons why we would like to be “beautiful” always?

For your convenience and to ease your pain, let me describe you about what exactly we mean when we say the phrase being beautiful. To understand this concept, let us go the other way round. Imagine yourself being fat, dark-skinned, having acne, dark circles, facial hair or any other body hair, uneven skin tone, danddruff, some skin problem, (let’s assume pigmentation or vitiligo) stretchmarks, too many moles on the body. (let’s just stop here, poof!) To put it simply, I’ve trodden you down to your worst nightmare right? For you, it might be classified into one single category as to “Not beautiful”. In my opinion, they are two classifications, One is your category of course and the other and the most important one being, Not being able to be in proper health.

Just hear me out before you explode on me with words like, ‘Hey! I’m healthy and beautiful okay! You have no right on me. I love my body. ” Of course everyone loves their own body, you know you do when something happens to it which disrupts its metabolism like a infection or fever. We understand it’s pain because it’s our body and only we will know how does it feel when we have fever, headache or nausea or anything as such. But when we get back to out normalcy, i.e., being fat or skinny, we again start to hate our body.

Everyone in this world are born in certain way; some are skinny, some are short, some are fat while some are anaemic, that’s your body orientation, which is completely fine by the way. Because these are certain conditions of your yourself which you cannot change. (basically I’m implying your genetic orientation) But certain factors like hair loss or any other skin problem can be changed or removed or cured. For instance, having darkcircles under your eyes can imply that you’re sleep deprived or you’ve been crying or being stressed about something. And not because you’re dark-skinned and you’re naturally bound to have them. There are many instances of such developed misconceptions ultimately being centralised to someone’s nature or behaviour.

On the contrary, there are other set of people who get depressed for things like having stretch marks or any other birthmarks. They feel that it’s nothing less of a curse and want to hide or remove them away. In my opinion again, if you’re ever feeling that or being made to feel that, it’s not your fault. The environment in which we were born and raised up tells us the same which may make us feel guilty about having them. In fact some of my friends find it weird about me having excess body hair. In fact, many of us go to beauty salons to get a haircut, shape our eyebrows and get waxed. Some people believe that they look beautiful if they do this procedure. Indeed some people look very clean and nice but it should be done on someone’s choice and not out of someone’s recommendation or force. Also some people argue that they’ve been doing it for themselves out of their own will, but little do they realise that it was not their own will at all. It’s like you saying that you’ve listened to your career counselor’s and opted for engineering stream; your counselor being your own friend who has chosen the same for herself.

So what exactly does the word beautiful mean? It’s nothing. To put in other way, it depends on you as to how you perceive it. If you believe that you’re beautiful without makeup or no makeup look on your face, yes you are. If you believe that you’re beautiful by being fat or tiny, again you are indeed beautiful. That confidence, radiance of your soul makes you beautiful, making everyone in awe at your composure, not by trimming, removing or doing something which can make you beautiful. It’s true when someone says Beauty is not made, It’s born and is original and real to it’s sense. And when you develop that attitude, people around you will say, “You are ~~being~~ beautiful.”