Impactof+Nature+and+Beauty

=﻿ABSTRACT:= My goal is to make girls and women aware of their natural beauty and see how it affects them, as I revealed in the piece below. I have already shared this with many girls and I would like to spread it even farther. For my research project, I am going to set a date in either April or May where ladies everywhere can participate by going completely natural (no makeup) for a day. I will be posting an "event" on facebook and sharing it with as many people as possible, not to mention I can put up posters with the date and information to get even more girls involved. By doing this, I can get feedback from them and see the effects of changing the mindset our society has so long been drilling into our brains. Too many girls and women are being strongly affected by the fact that they don't believe they're beautiful enough, but I want to change that and provoke girls to start believing that it's not about your looks, but rather who you are. Looks may fade and change, but who you are lasts.

"Real Beauty" Most would call the woman on the magazine "beautiful", the model on the catwalk "flawless", or the Hollywood actress "stunning, but are they really the definition of beauty? It seems that the lifelong dream of every teenage girl is to look like //her//; the girl every guy wants. We spend countless hours in front of the mirror with relentless thoughts of why our face can't be as flawless as //hers//, why our body can't be as ideal as //her//s; the list carries on. Our mind has been contaminated to believe that "beauty" is merely superficial. The media, society, music, and television have created an unrealistic concept of what beautiful should be. Beauty isn't only found in looks, it is much more. Any girl can be gorgeous on the surface, but it takes a truly beautiful woman to be gorgeous on the inside. Why should we waste our whole life trying to attain what we think //beautiful// is when we can have it anytime we decide to? You reach a point in your life when you grasp that being beautiful, isn't really about how you look, but rather a choice. It's about deciding to be beautiful on the inside and letting the distorted concept of what we //think// beauty is, fade away.

=﻿MEASUREMENT:= The result from Natural Beauty Day was astounding. The total number of girls that participated in this event was 4,567 and over 20,000 were invited to join. There was about 30 pictures posted of girls that took part in the event by not wearing any makeup and about 400 girls wrote on the facebook wall for it. I had private messages from around 15 girls and about 20 added me as a personal friend. On my Tumblr blog, I had over 70 girls that "reblogged" my piece of writing about natural beauty and some even complimented me on the idea.

=﻿SURVEY:= Because this was not a select group of people, and since such a large number of girls participated, there was no way to have them all take a survey to find out how many of them would take part.

=﻿FINDINGS:= I have discovered so much from this simple event. For myself personally, I saw how much I had been caught up in the idea of makeup making me beautiful. I didn't even realize how much my confidence depended upon it until I took a whole day without it. I know it seems silly, but for many girls, it’s actually like wearing clothes. Leaving the house without their “face”makes them feel naked and it makes them vulnerable and exposed to the world. Nevertheless, girls everywhere began to realize that beauty is not about how well you apply your makeup, but about what lies on the inside. Even though I don’t wear a lot, for the first time in years, I left the house on June 8th without makeup and realized that I didn’t need it to make the person I was //**meant**// to be. I could rub my eyes and not worry about my makeup being in the way, I could lean my hand on my face and not worry about my powder rubbing off, I could look at myself and see me instead of what makeup //**makes**// me. One thing that truly stuck out to me was what one particular girl said, "It changed my life." Another girl said that she is "comfortable in her own skin." If I had impacted one girl alone, this entire project would have been worth it, but instead, I impacted over 45,000 and that proved to me that God's hand was in it all. This entire thing has changed not only others outlook on beauty, but my own, and I think the most important thing you can discover in your life is that looks on the outside fade away, but beauty on the inside lasts forever.

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