Imagine you have found a person whose character matches yours completely, but he or she just looks like a potato, to clarify, he or she is hideous. Would you completely accept this person or would wish he or she had a different face? Nowadays appearance is extremely important in our society. But why is that the case? And what does being beautiful even mean?
A quality very pleasing to the eye, says the Cambridge dictionary, but pleasing isn’t very objective, so what is pleasing exactly? We encounter our beauty standards every day. In films, commercials, magazines and more. So we are confronted with the pressure to look like the models we see on a daily basis. Tall girls, with a flat stomach and long hair, that is the image our society shows. That is, sadly enough, what beauty is: unrealistic standards. But in the end beauty doesn’t really matter, you’re defined by your actions, right?
Not exactly. Good looking people have great advantages over the ugly. Take for example a look at salaries. According to research from Barry Harper of London Guildhall University is the pay penalty for unattractiveness 15% for men and 11% for women and overweight women earn even 5 % less than average. Not only do looks help in the job market, in both sexes,, they help in the marriage market. Handsome people are more confident, are helped faster and can even have a lighter sentence if they’re a criminal. So having a pretty face makes your life a lot easier, but how far would you go to achieve these beauty standards?
It starts very harmless with a little bit of make-up, but in a split-second you have had multiple facelifts, liposuctions and breast enlargements. Once you’ve stepped into the world of plastic surgery it is hard to get out. It is common human behaviour to want more. Rich people want more money and in this case, people want to get prettier and prettier through surgeries. And as well as women, men are also in this vicious circle. They take for example drugs to get an athlete’s torso and go to great lengths and huge costs to make themselves better looking.
It’s not only the western society that is obsessed with beauty, in Africa women put rings around their necks to be beautiful and in Asia they allow their to be bound to make them tiny. This sounds and is indeed dangerous, but so is plastic surgery. Before you decide to book an appointment with a plastic surgeon, it has to be clear how risky it is.
For some reason, people do not treat plastic surgery with the same caution and fear they would if it were another surgical procedure. A facelift can lead to difficulties opening your mouth and eyes and if that happens you most certainly do not have prettier face then before. But there is more, a facelift can also lead to a blood clot under the skin, which is extremely dangerous if left untreated. And a facelift isn’t the only dangerous surgery. Plastic surgery can cause nerve damages, infections and swollen skins looking like large blisters. And of course, you should not forget that every surgery has a risk of death, so is it really worth it to be beautiful if you can end up with huge health problems? Is being beautiful more important than your own health?

I believe that being comfortable in your own skin is very important. So changing your appearance to feel more confident is fine as long as you can still go outside without a lot of make-up. If you can still accept yourself in your own skin, then it is alright to wear make-up. I like things that are natural and I also like natural people. So if you would ask me if I would go to a plastic surgeon to be beautiful, I will say I’ll pass. I do not believe you should want to change yourself permanently. As long as you can go back to the natural version of yourself I support whatever it is you do with your face. The moment you can’t go back, is the moment I think you have taken one step to far. I also believe that the promotion of all these happy and skinny girls is very wrong and the media should stop deceiving the public that these beauty standards are realistic. In that way there are miserable teenagers trying to look like these models they see every day, not knowing it is impossible, since it is all they see. So for me, I’ll wear some mascara it I will be helped faster, but do these few minutes really matter that much that I want to lift my face? No, I don’t think so. Confidence is very important and before anyone goes to a plastic surgeon, I would advise they will go to a psychologist first. Maybe they will learn to love themselves, before they start cutting their face open.