To The Girls Who Are Attractive, But Not Beautiful

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You don’t have Kylie Jenner’s lips, or Angelina Jolie’s entrancing eyes.

You’ve never been able to fill out a dress quite the way Beyoncé can, or wear a crop top without feeling insecure about your stomach flab. Come to think of it, you don’t have any features that seem to fall under the generally accepted list of admired attributes, which – by the way – is a continuously growing catalogue.

It’s true; somehow us millennials have redefined beauty standards by adopting a more diverse list of adjectives into our visual vocabulary. You can now be curvy and beautiful (as long as you have a tiny waist between your voluptuous chest and derriere) or chop off all your hair into an ultra-short pixie cut (providing you have the delicate bone structure to compliment such a style).

Even still, somehow you do not quite stand under the umbrella of beautiful, and instead of stretching the terms and conditions of what it means to be good looking any further let me be blunt: you are not beautiful. But you are attractive. To adjust the definition of ‘jaw-dropping gorgeous’ to accommodate your crooked nose and round chin would not be an act of kindness or generosity to you. It would instead be a disservice to your character that does nothing but feed into the notion that you must be beautiful to be of value.

I feel no guilt in saying, as you should feel no shame in hearing, that you are not pretty. But you are worthy. Your wit is worth staying up hours past midnight to converse with. Your sense of adventure is worth following into places I feel less comfortable in than you do.

You are far from picture perfect, and yet your passion for life has inspired countless photo ops and fills the pages of scrapbooks that I covet on shelves. I value your spontaneity far more than any pair of defined cheekbones or perfectly shaped eyebrows.

I am not blind, and I do not love you despite your imperfections, but because of them. I love your freckles, and your clammy hands, and your unruly mess of hair. I love how unique they make you, and the confidence you exude while explaining the scar on your forehead that you earned during a championship little league game when you where five. I love you for every mistake you’ve made and every lesson you’ve learned. For you, flaws and all, are the most alluring sight that I have ever laid eyes on.