You are not beautiful enough.

You will never be beautiful enough. Even the most beautiful of the beautiful are not beautiful enough. All shall be plastic-skinned, flawless and symmetrical.

Uneven features are not beautiful.
Pores are not beautiful.
Freckles are not beautiful.
Smile lines are not beautiful.
The delicate crinkles of genuine glee are not beautiful.
Iris shades some of some unknown, unseen colour unique to you are not beautiful.
Stray hairs that give someone the thought of tucking them behind your ear are not beautiful.

Even your children are not beautiful enough.

You will always be too young, too old, too spotty, too uneven, too outside the beauty parameters, too human to be beautiful. Even you, the common, regular, non-famous little folk, even you should erase every little flicker of humanity from your faces. Feel the pressure. You too must conform.

Do these things, chase the ever-lifting bar of beauty, waste your precious years and happiness spending dollar after dollar, pound after pound, euro after euro, trying to be something that you will never be - an illusion.

Because you are human. Crinkly, spotty, sweaty, saggy, DELICIOUSLY human. And when you go and people remember you, they won't remember plastic skin or perfect white teeth or symmetrical eyes.

They'll remember your crooked smile, the line of your eyes and the twinkle that played against your uneven lashes, the unruly eyebrows and the funny wrinkle at the back of your neck. The softness of your old skin or the joy you spread regardless of the state of the body you were in at the time. They'll remember all those things.

The perfect, make-believe you won't even come into it. So don't rob the world of the record of the imperfect humanity of you by erasing it out of your photos. It is what those in years ahead shall cherish above all. It is what we remember each other by.