What even is beauty? Is it having flawless skin, long silky hair, a tiny waist or is it looking a certain way just so that you feel accepted into the cruel mindset that society has created on beauty? They say that beauty comes from within, then why are there still these standards on how girls should look, dress, eat and behave? Why are teenagers starving to look a certain way? Why are students being bullied because they don’t look a certain why? Society has created an image on what someone has to look like in order to be ‘beautiful’ . These standards have ruined children’s childhoods, ended tons and tons of precious lives and have made beautiful people feel imperfect.
There are countless of influencers on social media platforms teaching young teens to dress a certain way, apply makeup to cancel out your imperfections, smile a specific way and have perfect curves just to impress others. Is our life really worth doing all these things to be a certain way? The standards of beauty differ from person to person, but at the end of the day, no matter who we are, we are beautiful in our own significant way.Beautiful faces, stunning dresses and pitch-perfect body language shown in almost all beauty pageants such as Miss Universe, Miss World, Miss International or even Miss Nepal, taking an example of out own country, have ultimately created an image on how all women should look like. One of the causes of women feeling pressured to look a certain way is through beauty pageants like these. Even to get selected into one of these ‘beauty contests’ you have to meet a certain height requirement. And after you get selected, you have to go through training on how you should walk, smile, talk, pose and present yourself to a mass audience. Teaching 20-30 girls how to do those things then influencing other millions of girls watching the show to do the same is just horrendous. No living being should be told to do such simple things like these in a certain way.
Life is not a beauty contest. Girls think you need to be pretty and perfect and flawless beauty contests just support that. People are NOT perfect and they are NOT flawless like they show in those magazine covers. Beauty pageants are superficial. Girls shouldn’t be pressured to be skinny, beautiful, or perfect. Even though these pageants claim to have ‘beauty with a purpose’, in the end, the one with the face that matches with the standards of the society ends up winning.
Even though these pageants have questionnaires and ask questions to the competitors, its not guaranteed that the one with the best answer will win. In some cases of our own country, when a girl wins one of these pageants and isnt ‘pretty enough’ for it according to the society, that girl will end up getting hate no matter how good her answers were in that questionnaire or how genuinely good of a person she is from within. Even though this is the 21st century and people say that they have seemed to age out of discrimination and promote equality, it is still not being seen. Women are still being discriminated. Although people talk about gender equality and feminists preach about getting women to the level of men, why isn’t anyone pointing out the fact that beauty pageants itself isn’t empowering as it is supposed to seem. The first step to women empowerment is to create friendship between women, and beauty pageants are just doing the opposite of that.
Afterall, the bitter truth of these pageants are that they train girls to do things a certain way, then they make them compete with each other on who has the most fair skin, size 0 figure, best smile, pretty hair and other related things. In the end there is going to be only one winner. It is obvious that the self esteem, self love, self respect and confidence of the other remaining girls will be washed down the drain like it is worth nothing. Having a crown on your head does not define if you are beautiful or not. I think beauty pageants should be banned because they spread a wrong message to the youth.
Young people become extremely conscious about outer beauty, when in fact there should be platforms that celebrate inner beauty. In today’s world, there is so much hype about outer beauty, whereas other contests like quiz competitions and talent shows that allow contestants to compete on skill and talent don’t get such media coverage or hype.Being presentable is important but such pageants discourage people who might be born with challenges or might look different.Even the definition of beauty seems to be very limited and you cannot judge beauty on such limited factors.
Instead, they should open the contest to women of all body types. The fact that there are these beauty pageants for certain age groups are also disturbing. Kids from the age of 6 take part in these competitions, cake on makeup and waste their childhood being busy just to get a plastic tiara on their heads. Children may become more concerned with developing their looks than with developing their internal selves. Beauty pageants stress looks, glamour and, often, insulting outfits not suitable for their age. Children can easily believe after competing in pageants that they should concentrate too much on external and apparent aspects of beauty instead of developing internal values and qualities of caring for others and a love of learning. As girls get into their teens, they are often caring too much about how they look and how others view them.
Teenage girls strive to have people love them because of the way they look. When you’re a child, you can look however you want to. Pageants just add to the way a girl thinks the ideal look should be. It makes girls think more about the kind of person they outside than inside. Children who compete in pageants measure their self-worth by their looks.
This is what pageants teach girls: that the way they look is more important than their personality, the way they are inside.It teaches and promotes outward beauty should be valued more than anything else. Children are judged by appearance, and although many people say that it teaches kids stage presence and increases their self esteem, many children who do not win or do not want to be there are left with bad experience.
