Holistic Beauty from the Inside Out (3 page)

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Be Happy to Be Beautiful

T
here’s no way around it: these days, we judge the book by its cover—and people by their looks. Of course we know that beauty is only skin deep, but we cannot ignore the simple fact: for better or worse, beauty matters. As defined by Webster’s Dictionary, beauty can be summed up as “the qualities that give pleasure to the senses or exalt the mind.” And we, hu-mans, are all in for pleasure.

Beauty knows no time limits. A relief in the tomb of the Egyptian nobleman Ptahhotep, dating back to 2400 BC, shows the man getting a pedicure. Egyptians used milk and honey to cleanse their skin and made face masks of egg yolks and butter. Renaissance women plucked their hairline to achieve a desirable high forehead and lightened their hair with sulfur and onion hair dyes—they must have smelled as awful as our modern hair dyes do!

Beauty could be deadly. Renaissance women, who mastered the art of suffering in the name of beauty, rubbed their faces with whitening powders made of lead and mercury to achieve a
fashionable white pallor. Victorian women constricted their ribs in quest for thinner waistline and swallowed worms to obtain translucent skin. These days, women happily sacrifice their comfort for beauty every time they struggle into a pair of Spanx, or pluck unwanted hairs, one by one, from their eyebrows. How different is the ancient Chinese custom of foot binding from modern-day six-inch heels towering over three-inch platforms? Or Victorian rib-sawing from today’s unchallenged custom of filling the breasts with petrochemicals through the daily use of toxic products?

Beauty is money, and a lot of it. In the United States in 2011, people spent $6 billion on fragrance and another $6 billion on makeup.
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Hair-and skincare products drew $8 billion each, while nail products accounted for $1 billion. In the United States alone,$20 billion are spent each year on diet, weight-loss products, and club memberships, while $10 billion go toward cosmetic surgery bills, despite record unemployment, mounting health care costs, and plummeting home values.

Beauty discriminates. Studies suggest that attractive people make more money, receive lighter court sentences, and are perceived as friendlier and more desirable partners. Clear skin, glossy hair, clear eyes, and a slender body announce, “I’m healthy and fertile. I make a welcome addition to the gene pool.” They increase the woman’s pool of romantic partners and widen the range of opportunities in her work and day-to-day life.

“Beautiful people get all the breaks,” says psychologist Victoria Fleming, author of
You Complete Me and Other Myths that Destroy Happily Ever After
. “Our society teaches us to be obsessed with looks. But on a more basic level, our looks are what draw that first impression someone has about us. First impressions are based on visual judgments. The brain does this automatically. And frankly, technology today puts the pressure up even higher because there’s not a lot of rebound time if your first impression isn’t good! One click and you are literally off the radar.”

Smooth skin, big eyes, curvaceous bodies, and full lips serve
as reliable signals of youth, good health, and fertility. Psychologists found that men have instinctive penchant for women with large eyes, full lips, and a small nose and chin, while women prefer men who are taller than they are with symmetrical features. Recent studies also show that men have an instinctive preference for the classic hourglass-shaped body with a waist-hip ratio of 7:10.
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The state of the skin is an important signal too. Millennia of evolution make us instinctively suspect infections, parasites, and general poor health in people whose skin is plagued by lesions and spots. On the contrary, clear, glowing skin equals health andwell-being.
³

WOULD YOU EAT A PLASTIC BAG?

We have all got bits of ourselves we are not particularly thrilled with. Let’s be honest: I don’t like my tummy, and for very good reason. It’s flabby and bumpy, and no amount of crunches seem to make any difference. But here’s the question: Do I despise my tummy or the way my tummy
looks
? Covered in cellulite or not, the inner workings of my tummy—such as stomach, liver, bowels, kidneys, uterus, ovaries—function just fine, and I have no reason to dislike them. It’s the skin texture and the profile in the mirror that I don’t like.

Same with legs, hair, or ears. Many women dislike their legs and wish they were longer, thinner, or with less cellulite. But what about the daily work our legs do for us? What about places they take us to, steps they march up or down, sometimes in shoes that are clearly not fit for walking? Still hate your hair and think it makes you look less pretty? Then think how you’d look if you lost all of your hair after cancer treatment. You would be thankful to be alive, that is. Hair, or the lack thereof, would become a lesser concern.

Most of us hate our bodies for no good reason—until our bodies are being taken from us because of illness or other circumstances. According to sad statistics, only 3 percent of women with an
average age of thirty-three are happy with their body, while six out of ten women say their body makes them feel depressed. A total of 91 percent of women were unhappy with their hips and thighs, 77 percent with their waist, and 78 percent complained of cellulite.
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That’s when we reach for a lip liner, a new cellulite serum, or make an appointment with a hair stylist or a dermatologist.

“There are at least two parts to a woman’s self-concept—how she feels about herself on the inside, and how she feels about herself on the outside,” says Dr. Fleming. “What’s on the inside might be an uncontrollable mess. She feels insecure. She feels unloved. She feels unworthy. And these may be deep-seated feelings that she feels powerless to change! What’s on the outside she has a little more control over. She can fix her makeup to look just right. She can use the same perfume as Taylor Swift. Or she can just take on the latest trends as part of her identity, so that she fits in where otherwise she feels like an outsider. It distracts them from ‘ugly’ truths they want to avoid. It gives them a sense of control. Trying to help women understand that true beauty comes from within is a tough sell, because of all the reinforcement they get—and see others getting—for the physical beauty.”

The celebrity-driven beauty industry plants unrealistic images into our minds, and, in order to achieve the looks from the magazine pages or a TV screen, we are prompted to dye, straighten, erase, elongate, straighten, lift, polish, blow-dry, buy, buy, buy, and then buy some more. Not all of these efforts are for pure vanity’s sake. In their quest for longer lashes or smoother skin, women are really seeking love, acceptance, and success. “Sometimes that fastest route to that goal is to align themselves with others who are clearly loved, accepted, and successful—a.k.a., the celebrity,” notes Dr. Fleming, “There is a term called
BIRGing
—Basking in Reflected Glory. I may not get the glory myself, but if I stand close enough to you, some of that light will bounce over to me. When the celebrities are out of the spotlight, they have the same doubts and esteem issues as everyone else, but they put the
best of themselves out there for public consumption, and women eat it up.”

The gap between the cultural stereotypes of what we are expected to look like and the reality of what we actually look like is becoming wider than ever before. In one of its worst manifestations, discontent with one’s body can devolve into an eating disorder or obsession with plastic surgery. In less extreme cases, some women feel obliged to spend up to half their monthly income on creams, gels, serums, and lotions.

Dr. Fleming explains that pampering can be quite healthy expression of self-care: I love myself; therefore, I take care of myself. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing to indulge in caring for the self, particularly for women who are missing a sense of love and safety from a partner or from their family. If you grow up being told you are not worthy and don’t deserve nice things, then indulging yourself with creams and lotions could be a healthy defiance of those negative messages. Some of the best cosmetic tag lines over the years reinforce healthy esteem—“‘Because I’m worth it,’” comes to mind immediately. But the issue is that it’s gone too far. Women are using beauty products as a replacement for healthy esteem and self-love, rather than as an expression of it. I think that’s where the trouble starts.”

That’s when the “hope in a jar” takes root. Fresh-faced teenage girls advertising wrinkle creams only add to the confusion. The only true hope that exists in a jar belongs to the CEO selling it. He hopes that you (and millions of others) will have enough hope to buy him a new jet, a new boat, and a new villa in France.

At any moment, in any cosmetic department in any shopping mall, there are a growing number of women who don’t feel like being duped. They have a healthy, realistic relationship with beauty accepting it as the ticket to better relationships, increased career opportunities, and generally more rewarding life. As they age, they simply take pride in their wrinkles and silver hair, trying to look like sensual, older women, not like fifty going on twenty.

The healthy approach to beauty is neither pretending it’s shallow or unnecessary, nor being preoccupied with it. Being honest about your personal value of beauty helps you make informed decisions on how much effort, time, and money to spend on your appearance.

THE INNER SENSE OF BEAUTY

“At the core of every human being is a profound need to have value,” says Dr. Fleming. “The more a person is convinced of their self-worth, the less they need validation from other sources. There is a difference in what women and men need for validation. With a man, his self-esteem is stronger when he is respected and appreciated. With a woman, her self-esteem is strengthened when she is given attention and valued. Parents who provide these to their children consistently from an early age have children who become rock-solid in their inner security.”

I am not here to lecture on parenting, but for many of us,
something went seriously wrong at one point in our childhood or teenage years. For how else can you explain that when it comes to body image, women are champions of self-depreciation and gurus of self-punishment? If you flick through the typical women’s magazine, all of the women therein must be tall and flat-stomached, with shiny, perfectly white teeth, and laugh like mad while devouring a plateful of salad (Do they eat some special kind of salad on those photo shoots?). And here you look in the mirror, making a mental note of your blemishes, wrinkles, and double chin, and realize you just aren’t beautiful and therefore you are not desirable or successful. How does that make you feel?

We all want to look good—and I know you do too, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book. We could all throw up our arms and surrender completely to Mother Nature, go totally au naturel and say, “Hair coloring is for sissies!” But most of us want to look good, smell good, radiate health, and manage what we were born with in a way that makes the most of ourselves, without it turning into a battle of hatred. So, how do you find a balance between accepting yourself and still caring about how you look? Here are some ideas how to learn to feel good in the skin you are in.

REDEFINE “ BEAUTY ”

You eat a balanced diet, you fit activity into your daily routine, and you enjoy yourself when you’re out with friends rather than fret over how many calories you’re consuming. Isn’t that healthier than being at a certain weight or size? Beauty is about feeling great about yourself, and if you’re killing yourself trying to look “pretty”—for example, baking in a tanning salon, inhaling formaldehyde fumes during a weekly hair straightening session, or inject toxins to smooth out wrinkles—something is wrong with your approach.

“There was a saying a few years ago that went, ‘Love the skin you’re in.’ I think the way out of the rut is to turn your attention from the external to the internal,” says psychologist Dr. Fleming.

“You are a spiritual being having an earthly experience. That internal light, that spirit, is the most important part of who you are. There is research that has looked at ‘Quality of Life’ measures among people dying from cancer. They expected quality of life to decline, but they hadn’t counted on people finding new value in spirit while their bodies declined. It revealed that very often it isn’t until the body is in decline that people get that they are more than this physical form. Their spirit has little to do with the container!”

FOCUS ON “NOW”

Too many people spend too much time regretting the past or fearing the future. Beauty-wise, regretting all the silly things we did to our skin and hair, having too much sun, too much smoking, or alcohol leads to fretting the future with all its wrinkles, sagging, liver spots, and gray hair, not to mention other age related health issues. This “mental diet” of regret and fear will age your skin and hair quicker than you think. Every minute you waste disliking a part of yourself is a minute less of your life. When you’re eighty-five years old and look back, will you be glad that you spent so much time worrying about your skin and hair? If you get caught in the regret/fear circle too often, simply bring attention to this very moment and try to catch that moment of peace and serenity that feels like
now
.