“True Beauty,” New Era, Mar. 2003, 9
True Beauty
From one simple encounter, I realized what it means to be my own kind of beautiful.
One of my favorite posters printed in the Church magazines shows a beautiful vase of roses with a single daisy in the center. The caption reads, “Be Your Own Kind of Beautiful” (New Era, July 1986, 7). I often feel like that daisy, a relatively normal-looking person lost amid a sea of more stunning beauty. But I am slowly learning that there are different kinds of beautiful and that the most important is not an outward beauty but an inward one.
One day at school as I ate lunch and studied for my next class, I noticed a group sitting near me, talking and laughing. One young woman particularly caught my attention. She was tall, with beautiful black hair, dark skin, and high cheekbones. Her appearance was as unlike my pale, freckled face and red hair as anything I could imagine. She was one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen.
After a few minutes, the group rose to leave. But the young woman I had been watching stopped. I was somewhat embarrassed; I thought she must have seen me staring at them. Then something extraordinary happened.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but I want to tell you how beautiful you are.”
After a shocked pause, I started to laugh. “I was thinking the same thing about you!”
After she left, I continued to think about what had happened. We found our differences beautiful. At that moment I realized there is no single standard of beauty.
I have since thought about how our Heavenly Father sees us. I think we must be beautiful to Him because we are His children. And that divine birthright is much more important than any physical beauty.
Heavenly Father doesn’t care about the beauty of our hair or skin—but He does care about our hearts. When we strive to experience a “mighty change in [our] hearts,” then we can be blessed to receive “his image in [our] countenances” (Alma 5:14). This inner radiance makes us truly beautiful.
Background: Photograph by Grant Heaton