Beauty is Pain...but it's worth it...sometimes!

I know we've all heard the term, "Beauty is pain". I want to explore and discuss why women feel that it's necessary to sacrifice comfort for what looks good.

I'm guilty of this myself. I mean what girl hasn't worn 5 and 6 inch stilettos because they were FIERCE, just to have sore feet by the end of the night? The thing is, the pain is only short lived so it's worth it...right? My shoe philosophy is "The higher the heel, the better the shoe looks"!

But it's not just shoes that we go through pain for the sake of beauty. There's all types of crazy surgical procedures: breast augmentations and reductions, face lifts, brow lifts (all types of lifts), nips and tucks, liposuction, etc. Hey, men do it too...can we say, Gynecomastia (enlarged male breasts). At the end of the day, these things make people feel better about themselves and more beautiful. My concern is for some of the bad things that can happen during surgery and the health issues that one can have later. I'm not going to preach about the risks that are taken but I do want to say, please if you are considering getting plastic surgery, DO YOUR RESEARCH! Or else, you'll end up looking like this:

The issue of going through some form of pain or discomfort goes all the way back to the 16th Century when Elizabethan women wore uncomfortable corsets and undergarments to look thin and more shapely.

"The iron corset must have been exceptionally uncomfortable and heavy to wear and could only have been worn by Elizabethan ladies not doing any form of heavy work. Their only benefit seems to be that they produced the incredibly small waisted, elongated flat chested smooth line torso. "

Early Corsetry: Fashion History By Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com

In the past, women went through more extreme measures of portraying what was considered beautiful at that time. Crazy, horrible things such as: elongating and flattening the head, stretching the lips with metal rings, induced large eyes with deadly plants and binding feet as stated in Beauty is Shape  by Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com.

I'm very happy and grateful to be living in a much more open and free era. If women choose to alter their appearance, it's their choice and not a requirement. I think I'll just stick to the 5 inch stilettos!

"The pain passes, but the beauty remains."
-  Pierre Auguste Renoir