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WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL?

Denise Byrne
Colaiste Eoin, Carlow

If you were walking around a supermarket and saw a woman with a shaved head, a ring through her nose, a tattoo design on her arm and LOTS of black eyeliner and lipstick and she has a small child in her shopping trolley, what would your opinion be? Does your mother look like this? How would you feel if she did? Do you think this sort of body decoration is attractive or ugly? However you react, it's certain that somebody somewhere in the world would disagree with you! Different people have different ideas about what kind of body decoration is beautiful. The following are some examples of body adornment from around the world. See how you react to each one. Do you think they sound beautiful?

In many parts of Africa it is thought that an attractive girl should have really shiny, even greasy, skin. In the south-western part of Ghana a young woman, shortly before she is married, is ceremonially bathed in the river and given instructions in the things she will need to know as a wife and mother. Then butter from a certain kind of nut is smeared all over her body, she is wrapped in beautiful cloth (which covers the lower part of her body but not her breasts) and adorned with precious gold jewellery before being paraded through the village. Of course, the young men of the village want to marry her because she is so shiny, greasy and attractive. Imagine covering yourself with peanut butter. Do you think you would look nice?

On Bali, a little island in Indonesia in the South Pacific, they believe that a beautiful woman or handsome man must have perfectly straight, flat teeth. For this reason, when a girl or boy becomes a teenager he or she is taken to a special person in their village who will file off teeth points to make them smooth and flat. There is no anaesthetic and this tooth filing is REALLY painful. It is a kind of test, an initiation. If you can stand it without screaming or crying too much then you are thought ready to become an adult. As a bonus you get really flat teeth, which is really important because the Balinese believe that teeth with pointed edges make you look like an ugly wild animal.

In Myanmar (Burma), in southeast Asia there is a small but ancient group of people who are called the "Padaung". They believe that a woman can only be really beautiful if she has along neck. I mean a VERY long neck. Now you might think that you are either born with a long or a short neck and that there's nothing whatsoever you can do about it. But you would be wrong! At around the age of 12, a Padaung girl has heavy metal rings fitted around her neck. These are piled up until they are squeezed tightly between the chin and shoulders. Each year more rings are added and very, very slowly their weight pushes the shoulders down, in this way making the neck look longer. A Padaung woman will wear her neck rings all her life, never once taking them off. If she wants to scratch an itch on her neck, it's just too bad. It must be a lot of work carrying all that metal around. But for the Padaung this is the price to pay for beauty.

In the Sudan there is another tribe called the Dinka. Here it is the waist rather than the neck that is the focus of male attractiveness. The young men of the Dinka tribe wear corsets each one made from thousands of tiny colourful beads. These corsets are sewn around the boys and they press tightly around their waists. They are not removed for several years and when they are replaced by one of a different colour, a sign that a boy has become a man! The males of the Dinka tribe wear no clothing other than their colourful corsets. The parts of the body, which we always cover in public, are exposed for all to see. However if for some reason a Dinka man's corset should come off when he is when he is in public and expose his waist he would feel the same way you would if you dived into a swimming pool and your costume came off. Also, of course, without the corset to tightly pull his waist, a Dinka man would be considered to be very ugly.

So now I'm sure you will all agree, different people have different ideas about what is beautiful.

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