cheers to the beauties of the world: Dove style

i love when you find things like this that make you cry, wonder, think, and re-evaluate yourself.

in an attempt to be productive, i stumbled across this Dove video and realized three things:

1. i love my major--public relations can change the world (Dove simply does it best!)
2. women are beautiful; confidence makes all the difference in the world
3. maybe i do want to do social work after all...

maybe it is because i am my mother's daughter or something, but this type of emotional appeal really identifies with me. i seriously cried thinking, yes, yes, yes! how could something be so perfect and so DEAD on!

everything about the video, the lighting, the approach, the voice-overs, everything is perfect.

after analyzing the video, i started thinking about the personal message. how would people around me describe themselves? what would they say? then, i was thinking to myself, how would i describe myself? 

instantly i thought--eyebrows. i have been blessed (sometimes cursed, depending if i pluck) with beautiful dark, brown eyebrows from my grandpa wally, or so i'm told. if you look at both my mom and grandma, you will find them with the same dark eyebrows. i used to feel very self-conscious about them. i didn't know how to shape or even pluck them for that matter. however, as i have aged, i have slowly become more fond of them. they are definitely the most prominent feature on my face, one that i am becoming more fond of...

then cheek bones and next acne. isn't it interesting, even after analyzing this message of inner and outer beauty, when i thought about describing myself, i immediately thought of things i have been self-conscious with over the years. 

why?

it is the same phenomenon as pain. Brene Brown, Ph.D LMSW (social work) specializes her research in emotions such as vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. I love her Ted talk; i listen to it often.  She mentions that when she asks people about love, they describe heartbreak, or a time they have been hurt. When she asks people about belonging, they will express the most awful instances of when they were excluded. 

often when we think of beauty, we think of things that we can improve to better comply with our esteemed definition. our beauty is definitely something we need to remind ourselves of, especially as we age. why is it so easy to see beauty in others and not in ourselves? it is probably because we are taught, time and time again, to love others. see the good in them. serve them. compliment them. 

how often is that message reiterated for us personally? 

i love the analogy my mom taught me. when we are young we are cared for by loving parents (in some unfortunate cases, we are not). when we fall down, our mother brushes our knees off and gets us running again. when we come home from a hard day at school, we come home to our number one cheerleader, capable of taking away our distress. as we age, we lose that instant self-esteem booster. as a way to cope, we turn to other things--facebook, peers, validation in any way. unfortunately, we harness any type of validation, positive or negative, whether we like it or not. we forget that the mother or parent figure we had when we were young, we need to be. we need to find that inner voice inside ourselves to champion and lift us up. there are simply TOO many hard things in life to weigh us down. too many critics telling us no. too many "glass ceilings" limiting our potential. too many people wishing us to fail.

when we fall, when we doubt our abilities, talents, beauty, we need to be the ones to suppress those negative thoughts. we need to be the ones to brush off our knees, get back up and say i'm ok. 

just as Dove said: you are more beautiful than you think you are.

cheers to the beautiful people--both to those who know they are and those that almost do:)