As little girls we are taught “it’s what’s on the inside that matters.” In Kindergarten, when we chose who to play with on the playground, we gravitated toward the kids we had the most fun with, not the ones we thought looked the best. In addition, we never felt like anyone was judging us; we acted goofy and did whatever we felt like in the moment. Somewhere between 10th birthday parties and the discovery of lipgloss all of this changed. At some point, we became very aware of how we looked physically and we started comparing ourselves to how other girls around us looked.
The problem is that growing up it doesn’t matter how many times we are told not to compare ourselves to the models in the magazines, it doesn’t matter how many articles we read that explain how much photoshop celebrities use, and it doesn’t matter how many pep talks our moms give us about how beautiful we are. Girls struggle to define real beauty and to see it in themselves.
Maybe this month, some of that can change. The month of October has officially become UT’s Real Beauty Campaign month. Based off of Dove’s Real Beauty Movement, UT has launched this campus-wide campaign to help students find what beauty really means. Throughout the month there will be promotional events, activities, and speakers focused on redefining our society’s meaning of beauty.
The theme for this year’s campaign is “Love yourself to love the world.” As we learn to love ourselves and accept our own beauty, we are able to give back to the world with more of our own strength and confidence. By the end of the month, it is the hope that the women at this university will learn to evaluate their worth based on their heart, their soul and their mind (not what they see in the mirror.)
UT’s Real Beauty month is a platform for the women of UT to unite as one. It is an opportunity to learn what real beauty means, to promote real beauty in our society and to decide what real beauty looks like for ourselves as individuals. It’s time to get back to Kindergarden when we played with people who we thought were fun, when we didn’t care about what everyone looked like and when we were fully ourselves and loved every minute of it.