Loving the Skin You're In

“Stop the madness, you are beautiful just the way you are.”

One of the session topics with Girl Talk, my non-profit empowerment program for girls 10-18 years old is “Loving the Skin You’re In”, where we attempt to teach the girls that you are beautiful just the way God made you. That true beauty resonates from the inside and that the standards that societies sets are not realistic for the average girl or woman.

From the time women are little girls, they are given unrealistic ideas of beauty. These messages are sent through cartoons, dolls and other toys, such as Disney princesses, which have disproportionate waistlines. As our girls become tweens and teens and well into adulthood, there are music videos and reality TV that bombard their psyche. They are told that their natural hair is not good enough, girls are now being sent home from school due to wearing their natural hair that grows out of their scalp. Girls are seeing an unrealistic trend in some of our popular reality and hip hop stars with over voluptuous behinds that requires surgery to get. You can turn on the TV to any reality show such as Love and Hip Hop and see how all of the women have had some type of body enhancement. And that’s not to say that anything is wrong BUT if you do those types of procedures hoping it will make you more beautiful or desirable; therein lies the problem.

In the United States, shows such as “The Real Housewives” make cosmetic surgery seem normal by featuring procedures such as nose jobs and liposuction. In Brazil, there are nonprofits dedicated to giving low-income individuals beauty procedures. Their government also subsidizes procedures, claiming it will help with self-esteem.

In the Girl Talk session our goal is to get the girls to understand that you can do all the nipping, tucking, injecting and sewing in all you want but if you’re not happy with yourself on the inside, none of the cosmetic procedures done will do any good to boost your self-esteem and self-image. Here are a few stats from www.dosomething.org: 

•  Approximately 91% of women are unhappy with their bodies and resort to dieting to achieve their ideal body shape. Unfortunately, only 5% of women naturally possess the body type often portrayed by Americans in the media.
• Studies show that the more reality television a young girl watches, the more likely she is to find appearance important.
• In a survey, more than 40% of women and about 20% of men agreed they would consider cosmetic surgery in the future. The statistics remain relatively constant across gender, age, marital status, and race.
• Students, especially women, who consume more mainstream media, place a greater importance on sexiness and overall appearance than those who do not consume as much.
• 95% of people with eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25.

As you can see by the above stats, girls are feeling pressured at an early age to look a certain way; and often times that way is not conducive to a healthy psychology mindset about oneself.

Loving the Skin You’re In should be a mantra that all of us women ascribe to. We cannot allow celebrities or models to dictate how beautiful we are or what lens we should see our-self through. As the good book says, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the beholder is YOU!