BEAUTY IS AS BEAUTY DOES

Is beauty a blessing?
A necessity?
A goal?
A time-consuming, costly, full-time job?
A part-time job? YES.

Is beauty more important than luck?
YES.

Based on my life, I think luck happens more frequently if you're beautiful -- doors open in your career and your love life, and there are more opportunities -- a better chance for success in whatever you're pursuing.

You look better, you're prettier at age 16 than you are at age 30. Looking young is an advantage. Go for it! Aside from learning how to use makeup, and wearing youthful, flattering clothes, you have to stay shapely, and hold onto a stand-tall, young posture.

If you're a girl, you learn most of this early -- around age three. By age six you're on your way to being an expert. You've heard the story of "Snow White." You say, "mirror on the wall..." and you're committed to trying to be the most beautiful of all.

Deborah Rhode, Professor of Law at Stanford, author of 20 books, wrote "The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law.” Surveying appearance laws  and how these laws have created gender prejudice, she proved with statistics, that unattractive individuals are less likely to be hired and promoted.

Hey, guys, many of us have experienced this bias and discrimination. More and more people, young and no longer young, have eating disorders, depression, and undergo unnecessary cosmetic procedures. And all this is compounded by a virtually unregulated beauty and diet industry that grabs us, seduces us into buying their wares.

Can we stop discrimination with laws? Can we regulate the beauty, and diet industry? I don't think so. We like "pretty" things more than we like less pretty things, and ugliness is instinctively avoided. Anyhow, there are urgent life and death issues on the docket in Congress -- state and federal laws -- an endless list is hanging on the clothesline, desperately needing attention.

My three-year-old self is still a powerful voice, a pull, a confusion, a misdirecting force for "Em the blogger." I see that pursuing beauty is ... well, like religion, like success, wealth, like pursing a better life. I've got to handle it the way I handle the hundred things that tell me time is passing -- today isn't yesterday -- I am getting older. 

Aristotle said, 2,400 years ago, "Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction." Back in the 14th century, "Handsome is as handsome does" was proverb in Chaucer. Today it's "Pretty is as pretty does," or "Beauty is as beauty does."

Does what? What can I do? What can you do?

Nowadays, we've got the Kardashians, and super gorgeous celebrities, (males and females), who are  super beautiful with their wonderful clothes on or off.

You  can try to do what they do, but sooner or later, age will get them.       

What you can do is avoid the mirror. Quote Aristotle. Remind yourself that women and men down through the ages have felt what you feel. And along with the hundred things you do to stay young, get involved with what's on the clothesline -- get hugely busy helping, giving, supporting, sharing, discussing, learning.

Growing wiser is the only way to avoid growing older.