Beauty Is Only Skin Deep

There's a rather ironic saying in the southern states of the USA --

Beauty is only skin deep.

Ugly is to the bone.

What you have to recognize when you hear someone say this is that they are presenting a partition they have heard: 

Divide this world into beauty and ugly.

That's it. Nothing else. 

It's the partition of the advertising world. 

And those who say this saying are implicitly rejecting what the advertising world calls beauty.

The beauty used in this world to sell stuff, the beauty that goes on with cosmetics or with personal training or whatever, that's only skin deep.

If that's what beauty is, maybe it's interesting for a little while, but it's not what they want. It's not what we really want.

Maybe I was up too late when I originally posted this to a Facebook group, but I've had plenty of sleep since then. It's still meaningful.

Watch what you buy and what you believe.

True beauty is what the salescrew calls ugly, because they can't make a profit on it.

Beauty Is Personal.

Tweeted this response to a tweet today:

Still, thirty-some-odd years later, hard to understand why people who would choose to go to BYU would choose to buy into the looks competition.

I'm not just talking about the women who get too caught up in making themselves look unnaturally Aryan or Greek or oriental or whatever, I'm talking about the men who seem to think commercial ideals are better standards of beauty than what their own hearts tell them.

Perceived aesthetics is originally and ultimately completely personal. Letting other people tell you what's beautiful is a sure way to be unhappy.

(Whatever your gender.)

Yeah, I'm taking tweets too seriously, but I wish every Christian understood this:

No aesthetic other than perceived aesthetic is real.

Absolutes of aesthetic are all illusion.

No matter how trite it seems, no matter how much you think you have to doubt words of solace, Beauty is in your heart.

You are already beautiful to the people who matter to you.

No other standard of beauty counts in any real sense.