In the eye of the beholder.

Imagine a room of six mirrors. Four of them are the walls around you and the other two make up the ceiling and floor. Inside the room you are naked and alone; left to examine yourself in a full 360 degree experience.1

If I were in that room, I would immediately spot my flaws, and be making a mental list of them. The areas where the skin needed to be smoother, tighter and more polished. The parts of me which look saggy and not toned. I would be looking for the first signs of wrinkles around my eyes and cellulite on my bum; in short, I would be looking for as many things to criticise about myself as possible.2

But imagine an experiment in which we all had to find beauty within ourselves. After all, they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Imagine being in that mirrored room but not being allowed to see one flaw, perhaps even getting a slight electric shock if you so much as subconsciously think of one. Imagine that all you are allowed to look at is your own beauty and being unable to leave that room until you have listed at least ten beautiful features.3

Is beauty really just skin deep? If you looked for beautiful things within yourself would you only comment on your thick shiny hair or your sparkling eyes? Would you comment on the shape of your legs or the tightness of your stomach? Is that really what beauty is?4

What if we were to ask a blind man what is beautiful about his wife? I imagine he would say the way he imagines her smile to light up a room, the way her voice comforts him and makes him feel warm. Perhaps he would mention her smell and how he can recognise her presence in the room just from the soft scents she wears; or how the sound of her laughter is the most beautiful he has ever heard.5

Imagine the parent of a disabled child, a child born with several deformities and physical handicaps who would be seen as traditionally unattractive. That parent will describe their child as beautiful, because in their eyes all they see is the child's beauty. Would they hear the loud shrieks or groans which makes so many of us fearful or would they hear a beautiful song escaping their child's lips? Would they look at the stump which is in place of a missing limb as ugly; or would they cover it in kisses and love every part equally?6

Imagine a glamour model who was blessed with physically beautiful looks whose looks are destroyed when some crazed lunatic throws sulphuric acid over her face. When she becomes a burns victim covered in scars and her whole appearance to the outsider is scary, almost melted looking, yet her family kiss her scars and tell her she is still beautiful, because they see what is underneath.7

Maybe beauty is not just how one looks or acts, in fact maybe it is neither of these at all. Maybe we all view beauty in how it makes us feel. Is a rainbow so beautiful because of it's mix of blending colours? Or is it beautiful because it stirs something inside us, making us feel warm and happy by it's presence? Is a butterfly beautiful because of the way it gently flaps it's wings or it's amazing detail for something so small; or is it beautiful because of the smile that crosses our face as we watch it?8

Imagine being back in that mirrored room as you list all your flaws and having someone else, a stranger even, stand in there with you and point out your beauty. How would it feel having someone list only positive things they see, look at your body completely differently and see things which excite them and make them marvel over? Wouldn't it be strange to have someone look at you with the same fascination we look at the Mona Lisa masterpiece, like our body is also a wonder of art; to see someone want to kiss and caress it, touch it, feel all the lumps and bumps and imperfections as the most beautiful thing they have ever seen? In fact, to them you are so perfect and so flawless that their eyes erase any contradiction to this so all they see everywhere is beauty.9

To me, beauty is not the image someone can produce in my mind with their descriptions of silky soft olive skin or jet black hair with contrasting turquoise eyes. Beauty is not even how a person acts or the personality they have underneath; it is not any one single thing. Beauty is a feeling inside us which, regardless of what anyone else says, the vision before us makes us feel fantastic. Beauty is something that we look at and experience a million feelings of pleasure run through our veins, a picture so perfect and untarnished that we could talk all day long about how wonderful it makes us feel. Beauty is every word which describes splendour and perfection rolled into one because we would use each of those words to describe the beauty before our eyes.10

Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.