Yes, You REALLY Are Beautiful By: Alyssa Lasko

Freckles are speckled patches of skin that are darker than the surrounding skin tone of one's face. They occur when one's melanocytes produce more melantin in a particular area. They are most common on fairer skin tones (because they're easiest to see), but can appear on any complexion.

Personally, I like freckles. I think they're cute and add character. I've heard other people compare them to stars and I like that analogy.

But I guess not everyone likes freckles on anyone.

After Zara, a Spanish fashion retail company, used a freckled Chinese model to promote their new line of cosmetics, social media blew up. One of the main criticisms coming from many Chinese citizens was that Zara had intentionally chosen an "ugly" model to represent China. The model's "ugliness" being her freckles.



As frustrating as this is to me, I am not (at least last time I checked) Chinese. As much as I want to argue and shame China for hating on someone's features that only add to their distinctness and prettiness, I honestly don't understand Chinese customs or culture and can't pretend to claim to understand them either. Also, freckles being cute are simply my opinion and just because it's mine doesn't mean it's correct or that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.

One thing I can vouch for, however, is that rare facial features (or rare features in general) aren't always though of as being beautiful. In society, being different usually equates to being "weird" or not meeting beauty standards which in turn means being "ugly". 

But does it really?

Oxford's definition of beautiful is "A combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight". I don't know about you, but that seems pretty open-ended to me. But I think that's how it should be.

Just think, there are over 7.5 billion people in the world. No matter what you're sporting and how uncommon it is at least someone in the world has to appreciate the features you were born with. And even if that group of people who appreciate you is a minority, a minority of 7.5 billion people is still a group of hundreds and thousands of people.

While this may sound trivial, one thing I definitively learned this year is that everyone is beautiful. Seriously, we're surrounded by beautiful people. I know we usual associate "beautiful" with women but I think it applies to men too. Why? Because we all have something the offer that, as Oxford puts it, "pleases the aesthetic senses".