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What is "beauty?" If we look back through our history and culture, we see different views of what beauty is. If you are in the jungles of South America, whoever has the biggest hoop in their ear is considered beautiful. Take a look at the paintings in museums, and we see many wide-hipped, overweight women in the paintings. Society and culture, not any pretermined set of traits, establish what is beautiful- and what is not.

In our culture at this moment, just look at television and the movies to see what our society has determined to be beautiful and sexy. If we look at these mediums, we see well devloped women and well muscled men. If we look at American people as a whole, we see a nation of overweight people spending billions of dollars to trying to look like the airbrushed people they see in magazines that are, ironcially, sitting on the shelf at the same store where they are buying their beauty products and diet pills. There is no doubt that we are a nation of overweight, out-of-shape people.Take a look at television commercials to see how many ads there are for diets, beauty products, and even 1 hour face lifts. In the extreme, we have a person spending thousands of dollars trying to look like "Barbie."

Is this really how Americans view themselves? Or is this how the "snake-oil" salesman tell us how to be? The airwaves are dominated by advertisements telling us how to look, how to eat, what cars to buy, and, of course, that we can all get a better job if we look better. Vanity has reached a new extreme in America.

There is no doubt that we are a society that is overweight and needs to improve our own health, as well as our childrens'. We have seen a rise in cases of eating disorders and heart disease in the last hundred years, and even cases of violence caused by people striving to be "beautiful."

Vanity in America has reached epidemic proportions and we, as a society, must take a look at the cost- not only in terms of products and services, but on social level. The costs of vanity in America are beyond the billions we spend on our vanity.