The Culture of 'Beauty'

The more I ponder it, the more confused I become.

I’ve presided at a couple weddings over the past few weeks.  The women woke up early to get in to their hair appointments.  Many women had their make-up professionally applied.  Some dieted for weeks to allow their carefully tailored dresses to fit perfectly.  Hours were spent on making themselves look beautiful for the momentous occasion. 

The men rolled out of bed late, possibly took a shower, ran a comb through their hair, jumped into a tux, and were good to go.

Why this discrepancy?  Why do we as a culture insist that our women spend a fortune on make-up, hair products, and clothes while men get a pass?  The old adage tells us that beauty is only skin deep, but the billions of dollars spent on women’s beauty products shows that adage to be a lie.  

Vanderbilt head football coach James Franklin spoke to this ’need’ for female beauty in a radio show last week:

“I’ve been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant until I see his wife. If she looks the part and she’s a D1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That’s part of the deal. There’s a very strong correlation between having the confidence, going up and talking to a women, and being quick on your feet and having some personality and confidence and being articulate and confident, than it is walking into a high school and recruiting a kid and selling him.”

According to Franklin, a man can’t successfully coach college football unless he’s confidently ‘snagged’ a beautiful wife.  Really?  Is beauty that important?

I’m not sure that God gets quite so anxious about our ideas of beauty.  Genesis 1 tells us, “So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”  Something tells me that any creature created in the image of God must be beautiful already, without a hint of eye liner or lipstick. 

True beauty doesn’t depend on smooth skin or a ‘perfect’ body shape.  True beauty comes from being created by God.  Have we gotten so caught up in the culture of ‘female beauty’ that we’ve forgotten that?