Does Beauty Define Us?

Kiyona Turner
Pridetime Reporter

Beauty is such a powerful word and can possibly define how the rest of our lives perish. The very definition of beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.” With this being said, the human race has formed their own physical definition of beauty. Social media representation is a major contribution to this issue displaying many women and men who are the norm for “beautiful” but not showcasing love to people out of that realm. For example, I did a social experiment asking my 2 friends of different races how did they feel about beauty, and well their answers all varied but compared in a certain way. 
 
When I asked my friend Shayla, African-American sophomore at Brien McMahon High School, “what words come to you when you hear beauty?” She replied with “Girl with curly afro with light eyes” I also asked my friend Delaney, a Dominican young sophomore, the same question. She answered saying “ young girl with curly hair and hazel eyes.” Don’t you see a pattern? When I was reading the article “Society’s Definition Of Beauty Is Dangerous” I found two vital statements that really stuck out to me. Hannah Bayer, Student at Missouri Baptist University said “The definition of beauty has dangerously twisted how we see ourselves and one another.” I agreed with the statement because I see how much beauty has such a huge impact on our daily lives.  “When participants in a recent study were presented with attractive and unattractive faces for only 13 milliseconds, they were able to judge the faces’ attractiveness accurately (that is, in accordance with experimenters’ ratings), even though they were not consciously aware of the stimuli and felt like they were just guessing (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005).”
 
That claim was stated by Eric Wargo, writer of The Association For Psychological Science. That amazes me how you can determine whether someone is deserving of your attention by just looking at them for a quick one, two seconds. Both sophomores I interviewed both expressed to me that if they could change society's beauty standards they would set it on welcoming everyone, natural beauty especially.  I interviewed those two girls because they come from completely different backgrounds, providing different perspectives of things. However you can see that America's standards affect everyone and not just one selective group. Beauty is just a 6 lettered word, it should not as much power as it has now. Let’s make a change.