Societal Beauty

Turns out our standards of beauty might be wrong, gasp! Allow my lovely co-workers to be the guinea pigs for which these results stem from.

Case study 1. There is a young girl who tans herself, via this tube machine thingy...wait for it...EVERYDAY! After working a twelve hour shift, she goes to a tiny little whole in the wall place to sit in a suffocating capsule full of glass tubes to expose herself, voluntarily, to UV rays. All of this in the name of, beauty? Who was it and when did we decide that tanning is the standard of beauty? Oh wait, it is not just her that believes this. After she has especially soaked up enough and the results resonating in her oh so brown skin she receives all kinds of envious comments and compliments. This, my friends is a healthcare professional too. Umm, did someone forget to read the medical journal that states, as a fact, that tanning is not only dangerous to your skin but accelerates the aging process? Lets let that one fact go and try another route. She's white! We are white! Why is she trying to be another color? Isn't that some form of self hate? Can I dare to call it racism? haha Honestly, though if you think about it, there is a huge percentage of Caucasians(look at me, being PC) that are indeed, racist. I bet they don't think about it when they are trying to tan themselves, in essence attempting to look like the race that is more predominantly ostracized.

Case study 2. My one and only male co-worker is a 6'something giant of a man/boy. He weighs himself everyday. I promise you if you look at him you would want to feed him. He is this long stick of a vessel, yet here he is obsessed with his weight being lower. He announced to us yesterday that he had reached maximum capacity at a weight, I won't disclose(just in case one of them read this), that makes him physically and emotionally unhealthy. That is when he gave the standards our medical professionals live and breath by, siting him overweight by over nearly 100 pounds. My goodness I can tell you a scarecrow would have more meat on his stature if this were to happen. I was devastated and shocked at the inability to allow for self-esteem, personal preference...common sense! Turns out these standards were put in place during WWI, as a friend researched for me. How ridiculous is that alone? We are allowing an outdated source dictate current standards of not only beauty but taking into consideration physical fitness. Our lives were different then. Automobiles were less visible and we still used those two things called feet outside in the wild, rather than at the gym. Thats not even allowing for the genetic markers that are not factored into these unrealistic goals. Personally, throw in a little dash of pharmaceutical and health beauty industries and you gots you a full on case of peer pressure, governmental/industrial conspiracies coming together to sucker you into doing what they say, rather than relying upon ourselves. You know...that crazy notion that we are in control of our own lives, free and no longer slaves to anything or anyone.

Case study 3. We are nurses, if you didn't already know. One of my co-workers doesn't leave her house without makeup. I work nightshift quite a bit and even then you will see the vibrant colors poisoning her skin. She puts on so much face paint that I guarantee I would not recognize her without it; she might not be able to either.  How sad is that? The point of make up is to enrich your face, your skin, not to cover it up, transform it and inevitably ruin it. Now, do not get me wrong, I enjoy a good lipstick. You might even find my eyes lined with some crayon, enhancing my otherwise, no nonsense eyes, on occasion! That said, you will never find the idea of my own facial featurs in such  hate that I strive to erase them. Barbara Streisand said it best in a movie titled, "A Mirror has two faces" when her sister is trying to convince her to put make up on. She said,"Why it would still be me, just me in color" I love that line! Let it stand as the conclusion to my argument.

I don't know that I need to say anymore...but I will. I cannot believe we have allowed our society, the majority of these groups in power to dictate what we decide to do with our own bodies. We, for the most part, are rational, intelligent people that are more than capable of listening to our bodies , in order to find that perfect balance.