I tend to be quite honest with myself. I like how soft my skin is, and the way my curves feel. I like the shape of my face, the colour of my hair, and how cute my ears are. I also criticize the largeness of my nose, though I like the shape of it, the double chin I get in photos, and the twenty pounds I should be losing for health reasons.
I understand that I am who I am, and that there's more to my beauty than the way I look, but sometimes I just want to look like a covermodel.
The bar is only high because we like it there. We look at models and like the way they look, with their airbrushed makeup and thin forms. When we look at magazines, we don't want to see people that look like people we see every day. We want to see people that look like Halle Berry and Paris Hilton and Angelina Jolie, and I don't see this as a necessarily bad thing. The problem begins when we want to translate these fantasy images into a reality for all people.
Some people are able to look like covermodels without huge amounts of effort. Some of these people are lovely, while some of them only look it. Other women are beautiful with a bit of extra weight, or smaller breasts, or imperfect skin.
In real life, beauty is defined by who you are, not what you look like. I'm 5'7 and 170 pounds. I have pockmarks from chickenpox, and stretchmarks all down my thighs and around my sides from growing too fast. I have large, gapped front teeth, hideous feet and a pointy nose...
I'm still told I'm beautiful, and I often believe it.
I'm not covermodel material, and most of the women that you will encounter will not be. The select few that are covermodel material are lucky, but I wouldn't say that they're necessarily more beautiful than those of us that aren't. We're just different.
And just as a reminder...
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=97109