Beauty is a Matter of Perspective

I wrote the other day about my thoughts on how you see yourself vs how the world sees you. The Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign videos had me in tears because it resonated with what I hear from women all the time. The things we don’t like about ourselves are often the things that other people don’t even see at all.

I never want to minimize how someone feels about themselves, but I want to show them how the rest of the world sees them.

What has been fascinating to me over the past few days is the response I’ve seen to the campaign. Most of it has been very positive. It has made people think about the language they use about themselves, which I think is fantastic! But there are some people who are uncomfortable & angry about the videos. Wondering why there is so much focus on beauty. Friends wrote comments on my post, and I exchanged emails with others as well.

“I should be more grateful of my natural beauty. It impacts the choices and the friends we make, the jobs we go out for, they way we treat our children, it impacts everything. It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.”

Here is the thing I’ve observed in the 140+ sessions that I’ve done. I work with women in a very intimate way, and they have to trust me in order for me to work with them. I hear a lot, and I observe even more. I hear how you talk about yourself, and sometimes it breaks my heart. It makes me even more driven to show you the way I see you, the way the world sees you.

The Perception of Beauty

This perception of beauty? It impacts almost everyone. There have been very few people that I’ve come across in my life who don’t feel the same way as that woman in the video. Some level of insecurity, fear, doubt, questioning themselves. At some point it has had some impact on everyone’s life.

My dream is to eradicate that sort of thinking about ourselves. Thinking that beauty is so important, and that beauty has such a narrow definition. But it isn’t going to happen over night. We have to start it, we have to redefine what beauty is and change its level of importance.

I see us all at the beginning of the change. I am hopeful for the future. We have to be the start of it, women. Both in the language we use about ourselves and in the language we use about one another.

Just think about that the next time you start to make a catty remark about how another woman is dressed, what she weighs, or how she styles her hair…

Confidence and Rediscovering Beauty

You may have noticed above that my mission, my Superpower, is helping Hot Mamas grow their CONFIDENCE by rediscovering their BEAUTY. Those words are something I have spent hours & days thinking over before I ever shared them with the world. They are in that order for a reason, because I feel that confidence is one of the most powerful things you can possibly have. As for rediscovering your beauty? To be honest, it is REDEFINING your beauty. Seeing yourself in the light of beauty that the rest of us see you. Seeing that the issues that you have are not the ones that the rest of us see, and that we have to choose to stop letting this issue of beauty stand in our way.

My client Ms. S said it best in an email she sent me after her session:

There needs to be more AVENGERS of SEXINESS in the world, allowing other women to take back their self worth and sexiness and tell society to go to HELL. “I am SEXY and I KNOW IT”…. Thank YOU Christine for being my AVENGER of SEXINESS!

Should beauty be a non-issue? Absolutely. But people do judge a book by its cover, and people by their looks. It is time that we all stood up and redefined beauty, together.

You are more beautiful than you think. YOU ARE ENOUGH.