When you look at yourself in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see what you are or what you are not? What is beauty anyway and who defines it. Is it the film actors who have been made beauty queens by the media or catwalk models who have been made the icons of what is beautiful?

Last week I complemented a beautifully dressed girl and her reaction left me puzzled. She grinned at me and said "I am glad you noticed I was going for the Angelina look. Isn’t she beautiful” she said happily.

I smiled at her and walked away in shock. This is a girl who obviously associates beauty with what she sees on TV and remains blind to the enormous beauty she obviously possesses.

This girl made me want to change the way I see beauty. It made me want to change the superficial way people look at it. It overwhelmed me.

It’s as if these ideals and standards that we have set for beauty that makes it hard to see it in its different forms. Dont get me wrong I don’t doubt that some people the media has presented as beautiful are in deed beautiful but its our blindness to the beauty around us I now question.

I do not want to believe that there is a click of people or a person that hold all the values that we all can use to measure beauty against. I believe beauty is vast and is presented to us in all kinds and forms.

Think about it, we spend almost every minute of our day consuming some form of media; watching television, surfing the Internet, reading a magazine or newspaper.

In every form of media, we are fed information of what we should feel, think and look like. Look around you. What are you wearing? Is it a reflection of your taste or is it the current design on the catwalks.

Sometimes it can get depressing looking at all the thin, gorgeous women in magazines or commercials and thinking about how impossible it seems to be like them.

The fact is, it is impossible. But the possibility we all should bask in is our unique personalized kind of beauty the kind that will make us appreciate who we are.

We all can decide to refuse to be superficial than those who present us with images that define who we are. Even though it might be hard we can do something about it.

We must all take this challenge to look into the mirror and see the beautiful person looking back at us. It might not be an Angelina but if you drop that as a standard you might jut be able to see how much more beautiful you are.

Who gave the glamorous or the famous the right to define beauty or constrain us to what they imagine to be beauty. They might have presented the idea but if we are still stuck in their definitions then we forever remain tied to the cell of beauty conformity that they put us all in.

We must learn to embrace the beauty that stands in us and around us and in turn learn to love whatever stares back at us in the mirror. It is then that we will make ourselves beautiful because that’s what we have always been beautiful.

Email: pgathoni@gmail.com