Beauty Standards

When we are very concerned about certain of our physical features - a nose that is stubbornly a bit too large, eyes that are slightly too far apart, hair that is not as lustrous as it should be - we miss an overall point about our relationship to our appearance: how beautiful we feel has nothing to do with the objective structure of our face or body. It isn't what we look like that counts: it's how we feel inside . Our self-assessments are in the end solely based on our relative degrees of self-love and self-contempt. There are people of ideal proportions and exceptional beauty who cannot bear what they see in the mirror and others who can contemplate a less than svelte stomach or a no longer so supple kind of skin with indifference and defiant good humor. And at a tragic extreme, there are heart-breakingly fine-looking people who starve themselves to ill-health.