Beauty is deep, it is not superficial (near the surface). The idiom says that beauty is much deeper than the surface of the skin. This English learning video lesson is a good opportunity to learn some new expressions so I have given definitions for new vocabulary and idioms below.īeauty is only skin deep: This idiom means that a person’s inner beauty-not their outward physical appearance-is what is most important. Don't be frustrated if it was difficult to understand everything. This was a very eloquent speech and there were many new expressions for ESL learners. That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. We remember the beauty of her spirit even after the beauty of her body has faded away.Īnd so, I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey. It is what got Patsey in so much trouble with her master, but it is also what has kept her story alive to this day.

That kind of beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul. What actually sustains us, what is fundamentally beautiful is compassion-for yourself and for those around you. It doesn’t feed you.'Īnd these words plagued and bothered me I didn’t really understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.Īnd what my mother meant when she said you can’t eat beauty was that you can’t rely on how you look to sustain you. To the beholders that I thought mattered, I was still unbeautiful.Īnd my mother again would say to me, ' You can’t eat beauty. Now, I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far away gatekeepers of beauty, but around me the preference for light skin prevailed. When I saw Alek I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could not deny.

It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy.īut a flower couldn’t help but bloom inside of me. My complexion had always been an obstacle to overcome and all of a sudden, Oprah was telling me it wasn’t. I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman who looked so much like me as beautiful. My mother reminded me often that she thought that I was beautiful but that was no consolation: She’s my mother, of course she’s supposed to think I am beautiful.Īlek Wek (photo by Helga Esteb / )Īnd then Alek Wek came on the international scene.Ī celebrated model, she was dark as night, she was on all of the runways and in every magazine and everyone was talking about how beautiful she was.Įven Oprah called her beautiful and that made it a fact. I tried to negotiate with God: I told him I would stop stealing sugar cubes at night if he gave me what I wanted I would listen to my mother's every word and never lose my school sweater again if he just made me a little lighter.īut I guess God was unimpressed with my bargaining chips because He never listened.Īnd when I was a teenager my self-hate grew worse, as you can imagine happens with adolescence. The morning would come and I would be so excited about seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I was in front of a mirror because I wanted to see my fair face first.Īnd, every day I experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark as I had been the day before.

I put on the TV and only saw pale skin, I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin.Īnd my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned. I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I could never have guessed that my first job out of school would be so powerful in and of itself and that it would propel me to be such an image of hope in the same way that the women of The Color Purple were to me. My heart bled a little when I read those words. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me.' 'Dear Lupita,' it reads, 'I think you’re really lucky to be this black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I received a letter from a girl and I’d like to share just a small part of it with you: Watch the video below to hear Lupita's story. Unfortunately, Lupita did not feel very beautiful when she was growing up and the kids taunted and teased her about her dark skin. The saying “beauty is only skin deep” means that a person’s inner beauty-not their outward physical appearance-is what is most important.Īctress Lupita Nyong’o recently won an Oscar award for her performance in the film “12 Years a Slave” and everyone is raving about her beauty. This English learning video provides a great opportunity to consider the English idiom, ' beauty is only skin deep.' Lupita Nyong'o ( photo by Helga Esteb / )

Skin deep meaning