Age Before Beauty
Date Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 05:25 PM PST
Topic Beauty


How often we hear the phrases "How beautiful she must have been when she was young", "Oh no, I'm starting to look old", or even "She's so perfect, you'd never know she was 40!" People nowadays have an obsession with youth, as strong as their obsession with being underweight. Life ends at 30, unless you have the proper beauty treatments, or maybe a good plastic surgeon. Wrinkles and gray hair are a curse.

Bullshit.
People are starting to get the point about weight - you don't have to be stick-thin to be beautiful. You can see that anti-propaganda being fed us all over the media, although it is still so ingrained in us that we still long for the stick-thin bodies of supermodels. But still, our culture's standards of beauty revolve strictly around the very young. To be truly lovely, you need to look like a sixteen-year-old, or in your twenties at the most. Much time, effort, money, and often excruciating pain are spent on acheiving this.

But this is ridiculous. Let's take our media-induced blinders off for a second, and really look at these age-induced so-called blemishes.

Let's start with gray hair. I am starting to get an occasional gray hair. You don't see it, because I dye my hair, but that's not why I dye it. I am torn between my desire to be a redhead, and to have those delicate threads of pure silver running through my dark-brown hair. Ironically enough, my fascination with gray hair causes me to pluck them when I see them, if only to better admire their shine and shimmer. What is wrong with people? Gold hair is considered beautiful, but why not silver?

And wrinkles. Those delicate infintessimal lines around the corners of my eyes and mouth. I am 27, and although I still occasionally get mistaken for a high-school student by the unobservant or the flattering, my age is starting to show subtly in my skin. I love those lines, forming a filagree around my eyes, adding emphasis to my smile. Find someone you know, in their 30's or 40's, and look at those fine wrinkles, and tell me that they are not a work of natures art, time's embellishment on the smoothness of immature skin.

And that's not even taking into account older wrinkles, on those in their 70's or 80's. Skin that was once tightly molded to muscle and bone now breaks into a waterfall of draperies. No two faces drape exactly the same. The pattern of this tumbling skin displays a lifetime's collection of facial expressions. When an old woman smiles, you don't see one smile, but thousands, even millions of smiles, all shining back at you from through the years.

And this does not even include the beauty that comes just from the shining-forth of wisdom and experience. So many young people, overbrimming with typical and accepted beauty, only mar that beauty with the idiocy of their actions. But the words and actions of an elderly beauty are full of grace and appropriateness. The gentleness of their compassion, the astringant bite of wisdom, all this adds to and enhances the beauties of age.

So, don't dread aging. Revel in it. Find the loveliness in your own signs of age and in those around you. Don't let anyone kid you. The best is yet to come.

This article comes from Shmeng
http://www.shmeng.com/

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