When I was four or five years old, I asked my mother, “Why are all the big girls wearing so much makeup on their faces? Isn’t it willy willy bad?”( I pronounced the word “really” ” willy” when I was little so please don’t get confused that it’s a typo.) My mom sighed in sadness as she looked at the old magazines sprawled across the floor as we looked at them. “Well, some girls just like to wear makeup, even if it is bad. They just like to cover up their imperfections so they can look prettier.” I looked at the women on the cover of one of the magazines in disbelief. She had so much makeup on her face, that it looked like a whole new layer of unnatural skin growing, dominating the real skin beneath. She was wearing fake eyelashes and extremely heavy layers of lipstick, and incredulous amounts of pink blush on her cheeks. The eye shadow on her eyelids made her look like her makeup was done by a rainbow unicorn that had glitter as it’s blood. I didn’t like it at all. Not one bit.

The next day, my preschool teacher read the story “Beauty and the Beast” to us in circle time. I absolutely loved it. I liked the fact that they represented the prince in the form of a beast that had a kind heart who used to have an ugly one. In the folk versions, most of them represented Belle in a way that gave her a “damsel in distress” vibe. But in most of the stories that I read myself throughout the years, I read variations that gave her a rebellious outlook. Though her name meant beauty itself, she pushed herself to be more than just a pretty face. I liked that a lot.

I recently saw the live action Beauty and the Beast movie. But first I better explain the adventure that happened before. You see, my friend Jacqueline had invite me and 2 other friends to watch the movie with her in the movie theater. The problem was that my friend Subi was having the same plans, same movie, same place, same time. Since Jacqueline never had a birthday celebration with friends before, I decided to go to hers, and then hang out with Subi to get ice cream. Anyway, we all loved the movie. The way the director ( Bill Candon) depicted each character was incredible. Each personality, each costume, and each line of dialogue was well thought out and was put together into a masterpiece of art. One of my favorite parts of the movie was the way they reincarnated the story to fit the struggles of the way beauty is now defined. Belle (played by Emma Watson) was shown to be a very brave, rebellious, and smart young women, trying to find adventure in the great wide some where.

Every time I hear the word ugly, and the words he or she in the same sentence I want to curl up into a tiny ball and think about what just happened. I am literally an explosion of anger. When I speak I would have an edge in my tone. My fists would be clenched, my eyebrows furrowing. My eyes shoot a piercing look at the person who said the unfortunate sentence when they aren’t looking. It’s like a fire was lit underneath me. My friends always try to calm me down. But the flame lit under me was never tamed it continued to spread to the forest of my soul, no matter hard I try. Just because you have a pretty complexion doesn’t mean your heart is if you do such deplorable things like that. If you call someone ugly or not beautiful, don’t you even dare think you are. Because your heart definitely is not. A pretty face is nothing if you have an ugly heart. But an ugly face is nothing if you have a kind soul. My hair could look neater, my teeth could be whiter, my stomach could be flatter, my body could be more flexible. But those are a bunch of sentences with the word could. My life is dominated by “I can’s” not “I could look.” I want it to stay that way.  Honestly, I just think we are all people, we are all just souls living our lives. We keep correcting the small flaws that make us special. We can’t waste our lives that way. You only live once right? So wipe out that makeup, put down your mirror, open the front door and walk, run, jump, ride, whatever you want and let your heart soar.