What is true beauty

Whilst reading a very interesting book titled in the south one of the conversations in the book got my attention. In the chapter there are two old men having a conversation and one of them tells the other that he should be thankful that they were men of the south to which the friend replied "In the first place the south is a fiction existing only because men have agreed to call it that. suppose men had imagined the earth the other way up! We would have been northerners then. In this regard the points of a compass are like money which has value because men say it does".

A movie titled phat girls also brought out this concept. It was shot in modern America and two girls who found it hard to fit in because of the image society portrayed as beautiful and what they saw in the magazines found out that at the other side of the world they were actually considered as very beautiful.

This conversation and the movie made me start thinking about what we define as beautiful in our society. Having had the privilege of living in two different continents I soon also found out that these different groups defined beauty very differently.

In Africa a woman is considered beautiful when she is pear shaped or a voluptuous figure 8. Moving to Australia slim and tall is very beautiful. So what then is beauty? From the above findings I would like to conclude that beauty has no true definition and if we tried to confine it it would cut out a whole group of other amazing people.So sometimes I wonder, have our eyes been tamed by our mindsets such that what is actually beautiful is considered ugly just because society says so. And in our desire to fit in are we now changing our already beautiful selves into something less beautiful just so that we can get praise from society and fit into our societies?

The expression beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder has all of a sudden come to life for me. So it doesn't really matter what society says everyone is beautiful in their own way and I bet someone somewhere will see that beauty. So forget the models and the overrated airbrush makeup next time I look in the mirror I shall have a big smile on my face for true beauty comes from within. What will you define as true beauty?