To the beautiful

One would truly need a great and spacious makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in media all around us.

-Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

My youngest sister is almost thirteen, and just started junior high. When I think about the world she is entering into, surprisingly different from the world I faced not so very long ago, I have many wishes for her, wishes I also have for my sweet little nieces and my special daughter.

One of my deepest wishes is that they learn what true, real beauty is.

And, admittedly, this is a hope I also have for myself.

Because, frankly, I have to hope that I, too, will be able to keep my eyes above the ever-changing messages that surround me, obsessing about what I should look like, how I should act, what things I should pursue and spend my time on, filled with promises of happiness and pleasure.

I wish for this because I know that I will want to teach my sister and these sweet little girls, and even my brothers and little nephew

how to see the beautiful.

Elder Holland's words explain what I am up against:

"Frankly, the world has been brutal with you in this regard. You are bombarded in movies, television, fashion magazines, and advertisements with the message that looks are everything! The pitch is, 'If your looks are good enough, your life will be glamorous and you will be happy and popular.' That kind of pressure is immense in the teenage years, to say nothing of later womanhood. In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: 'We’ve become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth. … I’m really saddened by the way women mutilate [themselves] in search of that. I see women [including young women] … pulling this up and tucking that back. It’s like a slippery slope. [You can’t get off of it.] … It’s really insane … what society is doing to women.'

...

A woman not of our faith once wrote something to the effect that in her years of working with beautiful women she had seen several things they all had in common, and not one of them had anything to do with sizes and shapes. She said the loveliest women she had known had a glow of health, a warm personality, a love of learning, stability of character, and integrity. If we may add the sweet and gentle Spirit of the Lord carried by such a woman, then this describes the loveliness of women in any age or time, every element of which is emphasized in and attainable through the blessings of the gospel of Jesus Christ."

And so, in the hopes that I might be able to, as Elder Holland pleads, "help [others] escape our culture’s obsession with comparing, competing, and never feeling we are 'enough,'"

I wish to celebrate beautiful people in my life

here,

in
my
own
campaign for real beauty.



Stay tuned for appearances by gorgeous girlies, charming chicas, ladies of loveliness, delightful divas, magnificent mamas, fashionistas of fabulosity, amazing angels and other beauties not aforementioned.