Read an Excerpt
The Beauty Book
It's a God Thing
By Nancy Rue Zondervan
Copyright © 2000 Zondervan
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-310-70014-0
Chapter One
Ya Gotta Love It Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Isaiah 64:8
Okay, let's get one fact straight right up front: Every girl has her own special beauty.
Yeah, I know you've heard your mother say, "Well, I think you're beautiful, honey." I also know that doesn't mean a whole bunch when some kid's calling you "Pizza Face," or everybody's telling your sister she's drop-dead gorgeous and then patting you on the head and saying, "You're cute, too, dear."
But really, God doesn't make junk. He made each of us just exactly the way he intends us to be. So just like everything else God made-from blackberries to rhinoceroses-ya gotta love it. Ya gotta love you, too.
Yeah, you may ask, but if every girl is beautiful, how come "everybody" isn't seeing it that way?
Because-bummer!-people aren't like God. Somewhere along the way, since the whole Adam and Eve thing, somebody decided there was only one way to be a beautiful woman at any given time. Right now it's being five-foot-ten, weighing about a hundred pounds, and having lips as big as the living-room couch.
So how are you supposed to convince "everybody" that you're this knock-out, even though God shaped you like a fire hydrant and gave you lips the width of a pencil line?
You aren't. You only need to convince yourself, and that's what this book is about. By the time you get to the end, I want you to be able to check yourself out when you pass a store window and say, "That's me. Cool! Ya gotta love that!"
Here's a good way to start. From now until you finish reading this book, try to follow this rule: NO DISSING THE WAY YOU LOOK!
That means no dwelling on the zits that have appeared on your forehead. No talking about how fat you are. No wishing you had curlier hair (or smaller ears or straighter teeth). Pretend you are a friend of yours, and you would rather eat Brussels sprouts than hurt that friend's feelings. NO putting your friend-you!-down.
That's a really hard rule to follow, so let's look at some of the things that can keep you from seeing how gorgeous you are.
BEAUTY BLOCKER #1: TV Training
One of the reasons people think there's only one way to be beautiful is because that's all they see on television and in magazines and movies and on billboards. Even the Barbie dolls seem to scream, "You have to look like me!" But you don't!
Girlz WANT TO KNOW
LILY: Those girls on the cover of Seventeen have perfect skin. How do they get that?
They don't. Nobody's skin is that perfect. Everybody has at least the occasional zit, freckle, or scar from when she had the chicken pox. Those magazine photos are doctored up and retouched with computers that can remove blemishes, make eyelashes longer, and even give people great cheekbones! If you met those models in person, you would see that they have pimples, birthmarks, and little scars, too. No lie!
ZOOEY: If I use those shampoos and face creams I see in the ads, will I look the way the models do?
Probably not. For openers, that model isn't you. And don't you think if a company wants to sell a product that's supposed to give you thick, shiny hair, they're going to pick somebody who already has that thick, shiny hair? Besides, if you were born with thin hair, there isn't much in this world that's going to make it thick. But who says you have to have thick hair to be beautiful?
RENI: I'm the shrimpiest girl in my whole class. How come God even makes short girls, when tall girls are always the ones people think are beautiful?
Actually, people's ideas of what's beautiful change over time, thanks to "the media." Back in the late 1500s and early 1600s, plump women with rolls of rosy flesh were considered beautiful, mostly because the better-fed you were, the wealthier you were. In the 1950s, lots of curves were the going thing in the movies and on the posters. By today's standards, Marilyn Monroe would have been considered overweight, but men in the '50s drooled over full-figured women. In the 1960s when the Beatles said on the radio that they preferred petite girls, everybody wanted to be a short little peanut. The Beach Boys even had a line in a song that went, "You're kinda small and you're such a doll. I'm glad you're mine."
Does that mean somebody who was beautiful 40, 50, or 400 years ago wouldn't be beautiful today? How much sense does that make? Nah, this makes sense: Everyone has beauty-plump and rosy, round and curvy, short and pixie-like, and tall and pencil slim-not to mention everything in between.
BEAUTY BLOCKER #2: The Comparison Game
Come on, we've all played it.
"I don't have breasts yet, so I'm not as grown-up as Stephanie, but at least I don't have to wear those geeky braces like Whitney, so I can't be that bad."
It seems like a harmless enough game. After all, most of the time you just play it in your mind until you come out ahead of somebody and can make yourself feel better, right? Well ... hmm. Let's see what God has to say about that.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Beauty Book by Nancy Rue Copyright © 2000 by Zondervan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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