Beauty is truly an elementary concept. One of the first concepts we learn as toddlers is "pretty." Butterflies are pretty; Mommy is pretty; flowers are pretty. Contrarily, things even people we don¡¦t like are "ugly," "bad" or something equally awful. The boy who sat next to you in the second grade had big glasses that were "ugly." The girl who wore knee socks in the fourth grade was geek. What is more, with advertisements and TV programs perpetuating the beauty myth (e.g. age, size), ¡§Beauty Sickness¡¨, inevitably and evidently appears as a new disease with a group of symptomatic problems accompanied by physical (extreme disparagement of the body features), psychological (obsessive focus on the disliked body sites that severely interferes with the person¡¦s existence) and social (self-evaluation at such a level that interferes with social and occupational functioning) abnormalities that take place when the society endlessly puts attention on trivia of outer appearance.
Beauty sickness, as the name suggests, combines definitions of ¡§beauty¡¨ and ¡§sickness¡¨ as a whole. To be more specific, as far as its literal meaning is concerned, beauty means being attractive, appealing, allur
¡§Real Women Project.¡¨ The Other Side Magazine. Issue January 2000.
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