Do standards of beauty help or hurt?

I am probably about to offend a bunch of people but I’ll take the risk. I don’t know where this idea came from about how every single person on the entire planet is beautiful. Is everyone attractive to someone? Sure. But though I’m skeptical that everyone is a knockout beauty, I don’t think that everyone is a ghastly.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

I personally think that physical beauty is rare and that’s why it is so coveted. And that’s okay because beauty is something with which you’re either born or you’re not. It has absolutely nothing to do with who you are.

Regardless of what you believe, the comment is actually incredibly telling about our society. “Everyone is beautiful” is a well-meaning statement of course, but I think it could actually be harmful. Here’s the problem: Saying that everyone is beautiful perpetuates the idea that beauty is the most important characteristic a person can possess. Commercials, magazines and even pop songs tell us that we need to be beautiful to be worthy.

Bruno Mars’s “Just the Way You Are” describes his lady’s lovely body parts as opposed to — I don’t know — anything about her that will be relevant when they’re married with children 40 years later. One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” discusses how awesome it is that such a hot chick could be totally unaware of her hotness to the point that she stares at the ground out of insecurity! As long as she’s beautiful nothing else matters.

When was the last time you heard someone say, “Everyone is compassionate and kind” or, “Everyone has fantastic taste in music”? Don’t the internal characteristics matter most? I know I would prefer hearing, “You are so funny!” to “You really won the genetic lottery!”

Let’s face it: There are people out there whom society does not consider beautiful. Does that make them less deserving of happiness and prosperity? No. Does it make them less likely to live happy lives? No. Average-looking people find love and success all the time. On the flip side the emphasis on beauty takes those with symmetrical faces who also have other qualities to offer the world and reduces them down to merely their looks.

I do not by any means imply that we should cease to care about our physical appearances. I’m the first to admit that I love makeup and shopping and the confidence I have on a good hair day is fantastic. Be confident about how you look! But also be confident about more than how you look.

What if instead of focusing on how our bodies look in that beach photo on Instagram we focused on how we made other people feel? What if we accepted that our noses are a little big but that we could write a sestina that moved a professor to tears or managed to pull off an ‘A’ in that brutal physics class that had been destroying us all semester? Or better yet, what if we focused less on ourselves entirely?

The emergence of social media has created a generation of posturing and self-obsession. We are constantly picking and choosing what we want people to see, whether it be a selfie with just the right filter or a witty status that’s been drafted several times before it was posted. Not only does this create implicit and unhealthy comparison among colleagues, but it also creates an obsession with image and perfection. But people aren’t perfect. Isn’t that what makes life fun?

Let’s look outward rather than inward. By this I mean that the world has a ton of beauty to offer. Instead of trying to be the beauty, I like to admire and appreciate the beauty that I am fortunate enough to encounter such as a friend’s laugh, Christmas lights or a beautiful plate of pancakes. (I’m more of a French toast girl, but you get the idea.)

So no, calling a girl beautiful will probably not infuriate her or cause her to lie awake in agony. But remember that pretty fades. The idiosyncrasies, the witticisms, the kind gestures — now those are the things that matter.