BY: RAJA AMY

All over the world pharmaceutical, cosmeceutical, giant corporations dealing in beauty products, even companies dealing with complementary health care and traditional products have their merchandise being sold in large quantities to people who want to look beautiful and at their best.

Looking good and feeling right is now a global mantra. From yoga, to creams that bleach your skin so you become fairer and health and exercise regimens to tone the body and keep you in shape with healthy diets thrown in is now the fad and fashion.

What price vanity? The philosopher argued and advanced the theory that ‘favour is deceitful and beauty vain,’ yet billions of people want to look like the stars they see in movies whether it is from Hollywood or Bollywood or elsewhere.

It’s sheer madness to expect to look beautiful and at your best all throughout your life. The plain truth is that the human body was never built to last in tip top condition even for a lifetime. In saying this, is the need to look beautiful really an exercise in futility?

Looks like this has burst the bubble on people wanting to spend their wealth on being healthy and beautiful. No. Everyone has a right to look well. There is no wrongdoing in wanting to look at your very best.

But the moral of the story is that aging must be accepted and people will not always look good and they will have flaws and defects but look beyond this vanity and learn to understand that beauty is really skin deep and the real person to get to know is on the inside aging gracefully.

-THE MALAYSIA VOICE

** The views expressed on this opinion is of the writer and not the publisher