Society's intense focus on physical appearance and it's undeniable influence on the self-esteem of girls and women everywhere is something we have to come to grips with. This candid conversation where I stand firm in the belief that recognizing the role of outer beauty is not only important, but a necessary step towards authentic self-acceptance. It's time to reflect on societal norms and the contradictory messages being fed to young girls and create a more transparent conversation around beauty and beauty standards.
I invite you to join in on this important conversation, share your experiences, and stand with me in calling out beauty standards and making the decision to make loving and appreciating your body exactly as it is a top priority.
Society's intense focus on physical appearance and it's undeniable influence on the self-esteem of girls and women everywhere is something we have to come to grips with. This candid conversation where I stand firm in the belief that recognizing the role of outer beauty is not only important, but a necessary step towards authentic self-acceptance. It's time to reflect on societal norms and the contradictory messages being fed to young girls and create a more transparent conversation around beauty and beauty standards.
I invite you to join in on this important conversation, share your experiences, and stand with me in calling out beauty standards and making the decision to make loving and appreciating your body exactly as it is a top priority.
What's up, homies? Okay, I'm coming in hot today with a topic and an opinion that may be a little bit unpopular, and you might Just hear me out. Okay, I'm going to say something and then I need you to allow me to have this conversation and then you can come at me with your thoughts, opinions, beliefs, values, all the things. All right, because here's the thing. I've been hearing this everywhere and I've heard it my whole life, but even more so now. I'm surrounded by a lot of girl moms, which I absolutely love, and, as a girl mentor, I hear what we're selling girls. And I say selling because you know, I know that we want our girls to feel confident. We want them to know that they are beautiful and perfect and fabulous exactly the way that they are. And if you've been in my world for some time, hello, you know that my whole mission in life is to help women and girls look in the mirror and love exactly who they see. Love exactly who they see. And so by titling this today, you know beauty is not on the inside. You may be thinking Danielle, what is wrong with you? Where have you gone? Where has your message? Where has your purpose gone? Because that is not you, that's not what you stand for, that's not how you feel, and I want you to know that it actually is exactly how I feel and what my thoughts are. And I know it's unpopular, but I need you to roll with me here because I'm hearing it all over, right?
Danielle La Rose:
We tell little girls, beauty is what's on the inside. Look at someone and see their beauty for who they are, and that's important. Okay, I'm not again. You had to go with me here on this conversation. Right, like love who they are. See yourself, for you know your kindness, your heart, your character, and that's what makes you beautiful, that's what makes you pretty. How you look on the outside is irrelevant, nobody cares, it's not important. Stop worrying about that, right?
Danielle La Rose:
And we tell little girls this and we tell ourselves this, but we know in reality that's a lie. When was the last time you actually didn't care about the way that you looked right? When was the last time you actually didn't care, right, or think that beauty wasn't on the outside? Here's the thing. We say this Beauty wasn't on the outside. Here's the thing. We say this all the time to make ourselves feel better. I'm sorry, but we do. We say this to make ourselves feel better. We're hoping that it helps girls like love their bodies, appreciate their bodies, be confident in their bodies. Right, that's my mission, that's what I do, and I'm here telling you that us saying that is not helping. It's not necessarily hurting, but it ain't helping. So if we really want girls and ourselves as grown women to love and appreciate and be confident in our bodies, we have to come to grips with fact. We have to come to grips with reality.
Danielle La Rose:
And the reality is is that beauty is not on the inside, beauty is on the outside. How we see someone, how they're physical, how they physically look, is what we know as being beautiful. Okay, so before I like jumped on here, I was like, oh my gosh, okay, let me just go actually see what is the definition of beauty, because I don't know. I've never really looked up the definition of beauty, I just know what. I know it to be right. So I looked up the definition of beauty and I wrote down here. I want to share it with you. There are two things. Again, you can Google this yourself, but the definition is a combination of qualities such as shape, color or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Second one is a beautiful woman. Let's just go like what? Like men aren't, can't be beautiful, like I don't know. Anyways, the point is that the actual definition if your daughter looks it up in the dictionary or Google, which is our dictionary now, right, if we Google this, we know that beauty is on the outside. Now we can say all the fluffy stuff like yeah, yeah, you're beautiful, and then said, duh, we know that, we know what we mean when we say that.
Danielle La Rose:
But here's what we're smart, we are smart women and I that's where I come from with a lot of conversations, especially around food and fitness and body image is that we have to stop treating ourselves as, like these, sensitive. You know, like we have to protect ourselves and you know, be careful of our feelings. Like cool, those things are important, but it's really important to remember that we're smart. We know that there are foods that are really great for our bodies and there's foods that aren't great for our bodies. Okay, like, that's just a reality. We know that working out is really important for us. We know, right, like, we know that we're smart. Okay, so give yourself some credit, you're smart.
Danielle La Rose:
And our girls in our lives are really smart, and when they come to you and say that they don't feel pretty, or someone saying that they're not beautiful or something's wrong with them and they want to fix it. That's the society that we live in, and so if you just tell them like, oh no, beauty's on the inside, they don't believe you. They're going to roll their eyes, they're going to go look for other options, they're going to go look for other opinions because they're like no, actually I know that beauty is what she looks like and what she looks like and what she looks like, or it's her hair, or it's her legs, or it's her shape, or it's her whatever. That's the thoughts that we have, and so if we just want to shun this away because it makes us uncomfy, we're not doing, we're not helping her and we're also not helping ourselves. So I know it's cute and fun to just be like oh, beauty's on the inside, but beauty is on the outside. So you might be thinking, okay, cool, danielle, like that's rude. But now what? How does this actually help us? How is that good for us? How is that good for our daughters to know? Because here's the thing, no-transcript. And being beautiful is a social construct. Okay, my sociologist is coming out. Beauty is a social construct, meaning that it's not real right. We as a society have made it to mean a certain thing, right? So go with me here 50 years ago, 100 years ago, what was beautiful then is not beautiful today.
Danielle La Rose:
Even think about you yourself, like growing up, like, think about what was considered like beautiful right. Like what? What did you want to look like or be like? Or I had bright red streaks in my hair because Kelly Clarkson did it, and I and bright blonde and I look at it. Now I'm like what? Like mom? Why did you let mom, why did you let me do that? Why did you ever think that was a good idea? But, of course, she's my mom and I probably didn't give her an option because I'm like no, this is what I have to have. But that was beautiful because Kelly Clarkson did it right and we wanted to be whoever right. Some people want to look like Beyonce and some people want to look like Kardashian and some people there's so many things that we I idolize I want you to think about.
Danielle La Rose:
Think about like growing up, like when I was, uh, let's say, college, we didn't wear fake eyelashes. There weren't women walking around with, like, like, huge eyelashes, because it wasn't cool, it wasn't trendy, it wasn't beautiful. There was a long time where, being super, super tan, I can look back at all my pictures from college and see, like terrible tanning right. So like that was popular, that was beautiful. That's what you had to do to be quote unquote beautiful. And so we did those things.
Danielle La Rose:
And now not really that trendy at the moment it might be again later on, but right now it's not and so we get to understand and we get to realize that beauty is a social construct. And so when your daughter gets a certain age like, or girls get a certain age, I think it's important to treat them as smart, intelligent girls and help them understand and differentiate the fact that, yes, beauty is on the outside, because it's what we see and it's what you desire to be, because you're told that your whole life you're going to walk through store, grocery stores and see magazines. You're going to open up social media. You're going to see movies and videos and you're going to open up social media. You're going to see movies and videos and you're going to see music videos and you're going to see what our society at the moment considers beautiful. And so it's really important for us to treat her in an intelligent way in ourselves and to say cool, beauty is what's on the outside.
Danielle La Rose:
However, beauty isn't real. There's no like this is what's beautiful forever and that's what you aspire to be. Who decided what beauty is? There's a $550 billion industry, like, if we're being honest, that profits from insecurities, and so there's a lot of leadership there that says here's what you want to look like today, because we got those lashes for you, we got this for you, we got that for you.
Danielle La Rose:
That can change the way that you look, and so, but when we can equip girls and ourselves as adults to be able to look at something and say, okay, what is this trying to tell me? What is this? Is this trying to pull at my insecurities? Is this trying to tell me that I'm supposed to look a certain way? Is it trying to sell me a product? What is happening here and what am I actually trying to achieve and what is considered beautiful now? And is that why I'm being pushed in that way? And is that why I feel the way that I feel?
Danielle La Rose:
And helping her to understand, or ourselves to understand, that you know, I might not be able to look that way because my body, I'm not born that way. My hips don't look like that, my stomach doesn't look like that, my skin color doesn't look right Like whatever it is like. I wasn't born that way. I can still be my own sort of beautiful right, and I can still see myself as beautiful. And the number one way that I can get there is first by recognizing and realizing that, yes, beauty is on the outside, but beauty is not real.
Danielle La Rose:
We have made it up as a society and what's beautiful where I live isn't beautiful where someone else lives, Someone who lives in a different country, in part of a different culture, part of a different time period. We all have beauty defined in different ways. So there are some cultures that beauty is a larger body. Some cultures beauty is a smaller body. Some cultures, beauty is having dark body. Some cultures beauty is having dark hair. Some cultures beauty is having light hair. Every single culture, every single time period, every single like. As things change, beauty changes because it's not real, it's not set in stone, it's constructed by society, leading from a place of how can we profit as a capitalistic society, off of insecurities, especially of women, who will never, ever, ever achieve our definition of beauty because it's unrealistic. And so you know, for me, it's just.
Danielle La Rose:
I've been thinking a lot about this because so many, right, moms and girls, we're all trying to figure out how can we help the next generation be more confident, how can we help them have less issues with their body image, how can we help them truly love who they are and appreciate who they are, and how can we help them see their bodies in a way that they take care of and it's about self-love and self-care. And so we can do that by first starting out and stop lying to ourselves that beauty is on the inside. I know what you mean and I've said it plenty of times. Right, but we get to also not shun our feelings, because when we say that if someone comes to us and says I'm not beautiful, or someone says this about me or whatever, and we say no, no, no, no, beauty is on the inside, we're really just pushing their feelings away and saying your feelings are invalid Beauty. You know, don't worry about that when, in reality, the average woman spends 12.5 hours a week thinking about her body. The average woman spends $250,000 in her lifetime attempting to change her body.
Danielle La Rose:
So don't sit here and tell me another woman, a little girl that beauty is on the inside, when we're all doing things changing our nails, changing our hair, wearing makeup, you know, doing things, taking shots and pills, and all the things to get smaller. We got to stop lying to ourselves and lying to our girls that beauty is on the inside. Yes, people are beautiful when they're kind and they're helpful and they have values and morals and they, you know like, they stand up for other people, like, yes, that's a beautiful character trait. But when we talk about beauty, when we want to feel beautiful, we're all talking about what's on the outside, and so we get to remind ourselves that we are smart women and we have smart girls who understand that.
Danielle La Rose:
And the way that we can help her figure out how to use that to have a healthy body image is by first recognizing the fact that beauty is a social construct and being able to recognize that in media, in social media, in magazines, in TV, in all the different places, to really figure out, like are these my thoughts or where is this coming from and why do I feel this way about the way that I look? Because that's going to help her and yourself step into your power. It's going to help you, like, really truly be able to take control of your body confidence. So, no, it's a little spicy topic, a little interesting, a little different take, but I hope that that serves you and supports you and builds up a little bit of your body confidence to know that you can take action and shift your mindset around what beauty is and help the other girls and women in your life do the same exact thing.
Danielle La Rose:
Now remember that you are pretty powerful. If this served you or you're like, wow, I never thought of it that way. Or maybe you're like you know, I totally disagree with you. You've got to share this with other people. Like, feel free to share on social, let's have this conversation, let's talk about it and, yeah, I will see you on the next episode. All right, bye, friend.
