Guaranteed Beauty

By Janet Denison −

Dove recently experimented with a “beauty patch” called RB-X and the results were interesting. The women participating in the study were asked to wear the beauty patch for two weeks and document the results. Many said that the patch did make them feel more beautiful, and as a result, more confident.

The point of the study was to prove that beauty is about confidence and inner beauty because, of course, the patch was nothing but a placebo. I’m not sure if the study proves that confidence is beautiful or that the women were a little too gullible. I think it does prove that people want to believe there is something they can do to make themselves more attractive.

I really enjoyed another video that related to the subject of beauty. A mirror was set up in a room and people were asked to describe their own reflection. Meanwhile, on the other side of the mirror, which was really two-way glass, strangers were asked to record their first impressions of those people. Those results were fascinating. I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.

I wonder why it is easier to recognize beauty in others than in ourselves.  I like that Dove uses their ad campaigns to try to teach that beauty is about so much more than a surface appearance.  I thought St. Augustine put it well when he said, “Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.”  Beauty is about so much more than the reflection in the mirror.

Outward beauty has a lot of variables, especially these days.  A recent Huffington Post article reported that women reportedly spend $426 billion a year on beauty products.  Obviously beauty is important to a lot of us!

I’ve always wondered why God had us age and grow old.  He didn’t have to create us that way.  We could have been created to be born, and grow more and more healthy, beautiful, smarter and capable with each day.  Instead, we peak at some point and then begin the downhill slide toward more wrinkles, less hair and joints that don’t function without a snap, crackle or pop.  Why did God set it up that way?

Truthfully, it was his provision.  God made us for the Garden of Eden.  Sin is what caused God to say, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.  He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22).

God banished Adam and Eve, made them work the ground and begin the aging process.  He placed cherubim on the east side of the Garden of Eden to protect the way to the Tree of Life.  And then God has spent the rest of history providing a way for us to get back to that tree and into a perfect and beautiful existence.

The Tree of Life is in heaven and one day we will be allowed to eat of it.   The tree yields fruit every month, the leaves are for the healing of the nations and there will no longer be any curse.  Beauty will be forever (Revelation 22).

In the meantime we will age, wrinkle and hopefully grow wiser.  Beauty should be defined by God rather than our culture.  The culture keeps changing the standards while God’s teaching has remained the same.

Peter said, “Your beauty should not come from adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes.  Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.  For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful” (1 Peter 3:3-5, NJB).

If I could get a patch that helped me remember that verse each morning, I would buy it!  The good news is this: that medicine is always just a prayer away.  I hope all of you step into the world today, confident in your divinely created beauty!