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Living in an era where beauty is the demand of people, it has made lives difficult. Beauty now a day, is all about your physical appearance. If you are fair, slim, tall, have perfect jawlines and collarbone then you are “beautiful” but if you lack any of them, get ready to be ridiculed.

We live in a culture that exaggerates physical beauty above and beyond where its true status lies. Not all, but most of the people’s mind treat beauty as one of the determinants of self-worth especially in young girls and women. It becomes crucial for every one of us to examine what beauty really is, and what role physical beauty has to play in our lives.

In the world of materialism, everybody I meet is a critic with no stress that what goes around comes around. Physical appearance is all that people are running after. The world has become superficial and it’s more important for people to be beautiful outside, it seems. Taunting on the chubbiness of a girl, laughing at some short heightened guy, calling names to flabby, black people is a norm. Beauty has distorted over time that people have become blind to look through the deception. It is the media and society itself who has molded the standards of beauty in the apparent perfection.

Millions of people spend their thousands of money on buying beauty products, taking weight loss challenges, forcing themselves on eating tasteless spiceless food and salads just to lose some weight and have an ideal body shape, yet society does not stop hounding you and they start finding some other thing you lack. It is very easy to make fun of someone but no one knows what impact it has on the person’s life. Bullying, mocking and then enjoying are very carefree but we never know how it kills the person’s self-esteem slowly and brutally.

The depression of lacking beauty keeps on going when you get to know demands of rishtey wali aunties who want a good looking, homely and an educated, most preferably a “doctor bahu” for their son with the skills of making gol roti and an attitude of neglecting bias like a bahu in serials of Star Plus.

The philosophy of selecting a bahu has ruined lives of many and still doing. Why couldn’t a fat or wheatish or non-doctor bahu be better? Does inner beauty literally have no concern with a person’s beauty and character? Why is beauty the criteria of measuring a person’s worth? Meanwhile, if a girl is a doctor and makes a perfect gol roti but is obese then she would not qualify to be an ideal bahu. People won’t let you live anyway.

Is beauty limited to physical characteristics or is there a higher dimension to it? Is beauty an independent trait or does it shine in people with good personalities? Although the answers to these questions are very subjective, the Islamic view of beauty helps us to shape our opinions in the best manner possible.

Although the eyes may not perceive every creation around us as beauty, the Quran tells us that all creation is beautiful.

Who perfected everything which He created and began the creation of man from clay – (Surah Sajdah, verse 7)

The stereotype needs to be broken. Nobody is born flawless. Judging people on outer shell is itself a flaw. Find the perfection in your imperfections and live. The world needs you, is needed to be felt by you. Being overweight, dark, wrinkled or short is not appalling or to be insulted. Don’t assume that beauty lies in the physical appearance. It is nothing but an illusion.