By The Bel: Cameron Russell

“Looks aren’t everything. Believe me, I’m a model.” Cameron Russell talks on ted.com

If you have a spare 9 minutes and 40 seconds after reading this, I’d love for you to watch a amazing, thought-provoking clip from ted.com

How big a role does beauty play in your day to day life? Do you take that extra 5 minutes to put make up on before skipping a healthy breakfast, so you can run to the bus, to try and shift a kilogram or two off your thighs, that would look so much better in that particular pair of jeans? ~Hold on let me take a breath after that one.~

Cameron Russell has been a model for 10 years, and in 10 seconds she changed the perception of her audience by putting on a longer skirt and a jumper over her short, designer, skin tight dress. She also ditched the 8 inch heels and came down to a more reasonable level. She went from a ‘supermodel’ to a ‘regular woman’ within moments, creating a more approachable, and arguably, more believable persona just by the way she looked.

It takes a genetic lottery, a few centuries of unfair biased opinions of what is considered ‘beautiful’ and a team of experts to make the constructed, glamorous, glossy pictures and runway shows we see in our day to day lives. Those ones that we aspire to emulate, even though it is considered unobtainable to a large percentage of the population.

So if you are not rail thin, if you have darker skin, or are around 5 foot tall, if you’re teeth aren’t gleaming and perfect … on the whole, honestly according to those same glossy magazines, society should look elsewhere to find a person of value?

How vain, how rude and how superficial.
But aren’t we all feeding this monster every day? So aren’t we all to blame?

I challenge you to make a conscious choice to not judge someone by the way they look, or even judging yourself by your appearance. For just one day, look a little deeper and don’t take things at face value.

As Cameron points out, ‘Being fearless means being honest.’ Do you honestly want to be defined by the society who believes the unfair statement, that “Beauty is Everything”? Or do you want to be the catalyst for not allowing this statement to define you?

I’ll get off my soap box now. Good job Cameron!