by Rebecca Adele Scarlett

Created on: August 06, 2010

Beauty is a billion-dollar industry.  We are all victims of our hormones; hormones that make us desperate to find, and keep, a mate.  As humans, especially human males, are such visual creatures, our mates, especially women, are chosen based on looks.

There are good reasons that we fall in love with beautiful people: good figures, long shiny hair, and blemish-free skin advertise a person woman in the bloom of health, who is likely to provide strong healthy children.  Just as peahens are attracted to the peacock's elaborate tail display, humans are attracted to physical "displays" that advertise healthy mates.  The problem is that our "mate-finding system" can be tricked so easily with surgery, hair extensions and dye, and make up.

It started with men and women (mostly women) innocently wanting to get a "leg up" on the competition by making themselves appear more youthful and vibrant.  However, once certain people realized that there were billions of dollars to be made, an industry, and an insidious strategy, was born.

Women who truly feel good about themselves will buy fewer cosmetics.  They will purchase fewer diet pills or "wonder garments" that promise to keep everything in.  They won't consider sacrificing it all to spend thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgery.  Therefore, women must be kept feeling bad about themselves.  The beauty industry has discovered that by touting the least realistic female forms as the most beautiful, it will keep the maximum number of women permantly depressed enough to spend, spend, spend.

Think about it: throughout most of history, a plumper female form has been considered beautiful.  And no wonder; having a supply of body fat that is not too much but "just enough" ensures that, even if there was a food shortage, a woman could still conceive and nurse a child.  It didn't take the beauty industry long to realize that most women can have this "just enough" level on body fat of their own - with no need to buy diet pills or "slimming" jeans or jewellery that distracts the eye from the body's "flaws." 

The industry thus forced upon us an ideal of beauty as a sickly thin woman who looks as though she's suffered severe famine or illness.  It can be made to look glamourous with lighting and make up, and thin women can be made impossibly thin with photo refinishing, but the reality is far different.  Look at real women who starve themselves to get the figure on the magazine covers.  Their hair thins and falls out, the shadows under their eyes are larger than the eyes themselves, their skin thins and often sags prematurely, and their bodies grow extra hair to keep them warm (because their body fat, which is supposed to do that job, is gone.)  This is beautiful?

All people want to appear attractive; it's part of finding a partner to keep the human race going.  The desperation to achieve unrealistic physical goals, however, comes from an industry that, make no mistake about it, knows exactly how it is manipulating us into spending every dollar we have.

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