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  john007 5.5.2011 (14:05)

  Sir Thomas Overbury wrote such a sentence in one of his works: 'All the carnal beauty of my wife, Is but skin deep.'' What does it mean? Did he want to say that the whole beauty of his wife was included in her skin or was it something else that he wanted to express? I don ' t know but I ' ll try to explain it to you.
  
  Since the times of Sir Thomas people started to say that beauty was skin deep. There was 1 meaning of beauty - the physical appearance. This stemed from the fact that in the 17th century there was a common opinion that a human wasn ' t worth much in comparison with the universe. A human being was considered as a speck of dust when compared to the world. That is why a human being 's worth was diminished on purpose. People realised that they could do little and meant little in the face of nature, universe, God. People knew that their beautiful appearance, that is to say beauty, might perish.
  
  When it comes to beauty, people realised that it didn ' t last for ever. They started to consider it as a temporary condition. Poets supported this strongly.If poets kept telling people that beauty was something that disappears as they grew older, something that was impermanent, people believed them. If poets were telling people that they shouldn 't take care of their appearance, they did so because such was the ideology. Even in churches people were told that they shouldn ' t worry about their bodies because skin was only a weak layer that covered something that was shabby, miserable and insignificant. No doubt that people believed in this claim if everyone around them kept telling it.
  
  What is important is that both poets and priests were partially right because in my opinion the real beauty is not what we look like but who we are. People in the past were interested only in what was unstable, impermanent. That is why they were focused on the physical beauty. I think that there was only one meaning of beauty in the past and it refered to the physical appearance.
  
  Nowadays, the saying ' Beauty is only skin deep ' can be understood in 2 ways: either there is only 1 meaning of beauty and it refers to appearance(what was in the past) or there are 2 kinds of beauty - physical and mental - and physical beauty isn 't the proper one that we should appreciate. In other words, either we think that beauty is our beautiful appearance or we treat our appearance as something superficial which doesn ' t correspond to our real beauty which is our character. The second claim is closer to me. In my view, our appearance isn ' t as important as our character. Beauty is who we are. It cannot be touched or seen. However, its effects can be seen or felt. For instance, if we help a child to stand on his/her feet, we can see the smile on his/her face. If we feed a homeless man, we can feel the touch of his hand. Our good deeds are the proof of our beauty.
  
  All in all, people in the past understod beauty differently. They thought that beauty was something that was physical, carnal and tangible. Although, they realised that such beauty was impermanent, they didn 't seem to be interested in defining new notion of beauty. Nowadays, people know that physical beauty is only skin deep, that appearances can be deceiving, that the real beauty is hidden inside a human being. We can be beautiful even if we look ordinary.

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