We’re a week into the semester and I’m already exhausted. I don’t want to wake up an hour before my class tomorrow to shower, put on my makeup and do my hair. What I really want to do is roll out of bed ten minutes before class starts, brush my teeth and comb my hair, throw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt on and not care what I look like.
But I know I can’t throw in the towel this early.
Yes, when finals come around, I’ll be glad to wear my sweatpants and throw my hair up in a messy bun, but for right now, I have to keep up this “pretty-girl” persona, along with many of the other females on this campus. But, why?
It’s become a fact that in our society, beauty has power. In July, Ken Eisold of Psychology Today reported, “economists have recently confirmed something most of us have known since the third grade, the power of beauty to influence our judgment.”
Just how powerful is beauty?
Eisold’s article went on to show statistics that illustrated that “handsome men earn, on average, 5 percent more than their less-attractive counterparts (good-looking women earn 4 percent more); pretty people get more attention from teachers, bosses, and mentors; even babies stare longer at good-looking faces (and we stare longer at good-looking babies).”
Okay, so we know just how powerful beauty can be. Even babies like to look at prettier people. But I feel like the need to be beautiful is something teenagers and young-adults are faced with, more than babies, young teens, and middle-aged people.
Emily Silber, a 5th-semester international business major, said that after ending an extremely long relationship this past summer, she feels more of a need to look good everyday.
“It was never important before, but now that I am single, it is,” she said. “And I think that a lot of girls feel the pressure to look good everyday because they feel they aren’t good enough, like they aren’t happy with themselves. I still don’t get as made up as most girls, but I do think about looking good before I leave my room now more than I did before when I wasn’t single,” Silber said.
Of course, this wasn’t a surprise to me. As a single girl myself, I feel exactly the same way. But when speaking with Silber, I began to think about why so many single girls feel the need to be sexy or look beautiful while many girls in relationships don’t worry so much. Before the conversation with her I would have said the answer was because girls in relationships don’t feel the need to attract men with their beauty, I’ve realized that isn’t the reason.
The reason has more to do with comfort than judgment, like Eisold found. In past relationships, I’ve always found that gradually when you are dating someone and are getting to know them better, you become more comfortable not only with them, but with yourself.
Sometimes you even allow your “bad habits,” like nail biting, to come out. You stop caring about always having to be perfect, and you start letting that other person into parts of you that you had been keeping secret. Your obsession with the Yankees or your neat-freak tendencies may have been things you didn’t initially throw out into conversation, but, over time, you became comfortable enough to let them out.
When a person finds comfort, whether it is through the help of someone else, or through work or something else, being beautiful isn’t a major priority any longer. Being comfortable with oneself allows a person to let the worry of “what do I look like?” fade away, which truly shows just how powerful beauty really is.
To quote fictional character Carrie Bradshaw of “Sex and the City,” “the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you can find someone to love the you, you love, well, that’s just fabulous.”