What I Know About Being Beautiful

My mom read this story to us kids a morning ago while we were having breakfast.

By Enid C. Anfinson

"Pretty is as pretty does," Mother would invariably say when trying to assuage my wounded ego after some friend (and there were many) had exclaimed, "What a beau­tiful child!"—always staring straight past me to gaze at my sister Ida.
Ida's dark hair hung shoulder length in silky curls while my kinky locks popped back from Mother's comb in hundreds of tight corkscrew curls like the coat of a poodle. I knew I would never be pretty, and I resented it.
The summer that I was 11 years old, Lilla Haley returned to our town. For years I had been hearing the praises of this wonderful woman. Mother's friends never ended a coffee get-together without lamenting our community's great loss when Lilla moved away. Now after all these years, she was returning.
"Who is this lady?" I asked mother.
"Lilla," mother explained, "is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. She was a teacher and a nurse and always the Good Samaritan. She has helped find a good home for many a homeless child. She has helped everyone she knows."
I began to paint mental pictures of Lilla. She would be stately, regal, wide-eyed with long dark lashes, a breathtaking figure, and a fine complexion.
It was nine o'clock one morning, two days before anyone in town expected her, that Lilla breezed into our house. Mother was baking cookies. I was on my knees cleaning the cupboard under the sink. Ida was straightening her room.
I stared at the long-awaited Lilla, and my eyes popped. She was short, with a little stoop to her shoulders. Her sandy brown hair was streaked with white. But what was shocking was her mouth. With protruding jaw and uneven teeth, her mouth was badly misshapen.
After the glad cries of reunion between her and Mother, Lilla noticed Ida and me standing by the door, gaping. "Oh," she said, "I almost forgot you had two lovely daughters." Then the miracle happened. Instead of gushing about Ida's beauty, she looked right past her at me.
"That hair!" she said. "Let me feel it." I walked slowly to her side. "Beautiful," she exclaimed, fingering the corkscrew curls. "You'll never have to bother with curling irons as most of us do."
From that day until her demise at the age of 80, Lilla was a very special friend of mine, as she was to all who knew her.
One day I asked her the question that was on my mind: "Lilla," I said, "why are you so nice to everyone?"
She smiled at me. "Enid, I would have been the most miserable and mean person in the world had it not been for my mother. You know I am no beauty and I was very self-conscious about it. One day I blurted out to my mother, ‘Why do I have to have such an ugly mouth?'
"Mother gathered me in her arms. ‘Re­member always,' she said, ‘it is not the shape of a person's mouth that makes her beautiful. It is what comes out of the mouth that makes her beautiful or ugly. I'll promise you if you let only kind words come through your mouth, you'll be the most beautiful person in the world.
"‘But you will need help, and God is always near to help you. Just remember to ask Him.' I have tried all my life to do just that."
It was then I understood my mother's words—pretty is as pretty does.

"Pretty is as pretty does" -that phrase has more meaning to me in spanish, my mother language, "Eres tan bonita como te sientas". The direct translation would be: "You are as pretty as you feel you are".

...believe it.
As much as you think there are so many people much more beautiful than you are, that doesn't take away the fact that you are YOU and you are B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L.
It's so sad to see people whom I truly know to be of the most beautiful people I've met believe they are not, that there is something really wrong with them. In fact they think there's nothing lovely about them, that they're ugly and with plenty of imperfections and of all sorts. I'm not talking about the ones who voice these things cause they want someone to tell them otherwise. I'm talking about the beautiful people in my life who don't think they're beautiful, when every smile, every lock of their wild hair, every eyelash, curve and line say they are.
I don't know what you'd say, but I'd love it if you could join me on a campaign...to tell those beautiful people how they are pretty and lovely in the ways you think they are. Just tell them, you never know how much you could alter their life and change the course it takes... feeling beautiful is a human need I'd say, it's part of being loved and cherished and looked upon as special, incomparable. We all need that, we all want it, we all can give it.