Beauty and the Media

What is beauty? According to the Merrian Webster Dictionary, the word beauty is defined as “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit”. The media and entertainment industry, however, has redefined the term in a way where most people today think of beauty only as a physical trait, focusing only on a set of external qualities and always comparing these qualities to those of the latest model or celebrity which is hailed as beautiful by the media.

In their quest for beauty, during 2006 Americans spent just under 12.2 billion dollars on nearly 11.5 million cosmetic surgeries. Every year as new procedures are created to improve our appearance, the demand for newer and even better procedures increases. Several reality televisions shows have made millions of dollars tracking the experience of individuals during their cosmetic surgery procedures. The common denominator among the majority of the people documented on these television shows is the need to surgically correct a physical flaw that they feel prevents them from being beautiful. My mother used to tell me that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but perhaps a more accurate description in today's world would be that beauty is in the eye of the media

A good example of this is Marilyn Monroe. During the decade of the 1950’s Marilyn Monroe was portrayed as one of the most beautiful women around the world, but today you can argue that a woman with Marilyn Monroe's curvy figure wouldn’t fit the “updated” beauty standards. You'd be hard pressed to find an individual who doesn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful, so, that begs the question, what has changed?

For years we have been fed a concept of what should be portrayed as beautiful. Every time you turn on the television or open a magazine there are pictures of actresses and models setting the