Most of us must not have heard of the word beauty sickness, but if you are a woman, there’s a good chance you have felt beauty sickness. If you have thought about staying home instead of attending an important event because you didn’t think you looked good enough, that was beauty sickness.

Beauty sickness is what happens when a woman’s emotional energy gets so bound up with what she sees in the mirror that it becomes harder for her to see other aspects of her life due to the constant urge to feel pretty and the constant thinking. Will I be pretty enough is exhausting for girls and women.

Whether we would like to admit it or not, modern society obsessively focuses on the appearance of women over anything else they might have to offer. In today’s society, around 90 per cent of young women have no problem naming a body part with which they are unhappy, this is what beauty sickness does to a woman. Young girls and women are our future leaders, and they are sick of wondering if they will ever be beautiful enough, they are beauty sick. Although we hear about beauty sickness mostly in young girls but it affects women of all ages.

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Beauty sickness steals women’s time, energy and money, moving us further away from the people we want to be and the life we want to live. It keeps us facing the mirror instead of facing the world.

If you feel short of time and money but still spend plenty of both trying to push yourself closer to our culture’s beauty ideal, you can blame beauty sickness. If you want to stop worrying about how you look but keep getting pulled back to the mirror, then you know what beauty sickness feels like.

Beauty sickness teaches young girls that learning to apply makeup is a more important skill than learning to do science or math.

The current generation of a young woman is the most educated we have seen. They are marked by stunning ambition and great determination. They have bright open futures, and many embraced feminism and yet we live in a culture that teaches them to value their beauty above all else, they are often leaning closer to the mirror instead of closer to their dreams.

Beauty would appear to be powerful for women, but actually it’s weak and is a temporary power.

As women we learn, that beauty is the power that matters most. It’s no secret that beauty is a kind of currency for women. It does offer a type of power over other people but let’s be honest about what kind of power this is. It’s a type of power that’s almost impossible to earn if you weren’t born into it.

It is said, “Never be too proud of your youth or your beauty; you did nothing to earn them, and you can do nothing to keep them”.

Women should become more powerful with age, as they gain valuable skills, experience and wisdom. If we tie our power to our body, we risk letting it trail away with our youth that we lose with the addition in age.

In a world of social media, images of our peers often feel more realistic than they actually are. It’s easy to forget that many of these images have also been carefully posed, selected from dozens (or often hundreds) of shots, photoshopped and filtered.

Two researchers Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi Ann Roberts published a theory that provided a picture perspective on the way our cultures focus on girls and women’s appearance as making them sick, they call it objectification theory. Objectification boils down to this: it’s what happens when you are not treated as an actual human being with thoughts, feeling goals, and desires. Instead you are treated as a body or just a collection of body parts even, worse, your body is seen as something that exists just to make other people happy.

In other words, if we can reduce the amount of attention young women are dedicating to the appearance of their bodies, we might decrease rates of depression as well.

I like to remember it this way: ‘Everything on this planet will either fade away or die; you are no exception’.

Aside from beauty “To be truly attractive, you must accept and take care of your body and cherish and nourish your mind. You must care about other people and strive for knowledge, a pretty body is not everything”.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Voice of Ladakh or its editorial team.