WHAT IS BEAUTY

Today is to come face to face with the changing definition of beauty. Perhaps more then other time in history, we are preoccupied with, even confused by beauty: its power, its pleasures, its style, and its substance. Beauty may be not be important of our values, but it affects us all; today more than ever , because we live in a media age where our visual land scape changes in seconds, and our first reaction to people is sometimes our last. Given this reality, the so- called “triviality” oh beauty suddenly seems not so trivial after all.

The beauty we see today is different, more complex. It’s elusive, evolutionary, even controversial. No longer is beauty limited to a pretty face or a pretty picture: beauty has to come to personify and reflect the social and cultural issues of our day.

IT IS SAID THAT BEAUTY COMES FROM WITHIN and “beauty is being our self”. Noble sentiments indeed, but I’m convinced that what’s good for the self is also good for the soul.
We’ve certainly got technology on our side- laser tooth whitening; non fading hair dye; alpha hydroxyl acids; lipstick that lasts all day.. And enthusiastic beauty experts in spades, the waxers, the pluckers, the facialists, the cutters and colorist, the make up artist, the perfumers , all conspiring to render womankind more ravishing than a life time of good deeds ever could.

Products, treatments, miracle- workers: This is the stuff of beauty. And beauty is the stuff for life.

Recently, even as she lay terribly ill with cancer, my very dear aunt placed an urgent call to me in New York: “ I have just smelled something WONDERFUL on your mother.. she says it’s Allure and I MUST have some”

The package was rushed off; we didn’t speak again until I went to visit her deathbed a few short weeks later.

Sifting trough her make up bag one afternoon, looking for something to amuse both of us, I found the flask of perfume and misted her. Her eyes were closed; she was exhausted and near the end.

“Wonderful.. Wonderful.. She enthused.” I fell so pretty”

Exactly.

Amy astley
Dorothy Scheefer

Beauty has many nuances from deep to shallow from outside within. Today beauty comes in many shapes and forms beauty touches all of us.

Gabriel Peralta .MD