Inner & Outer Beauty in Teenagers

Skincare

• Makeup is an exciting part of your teenage daughter's life. Wearing makeup can help enhance natural outer beauty and make a teen feel more confident about their appearance. However, your teen must learn to wear it correctly. The first step is a healthy complexion with the right skincare. Teach your teen how to cleanse and moisturize skin before applying makeup, and how to remove makeup correctly. A cosmetics consultant can help your teen choose the best types and colors for her skin tone and hair color, and how to apply them properly. Emphasize that beauty is not about covering her face with makeup, but letting her own features and complexion shine through.

Perception

• The media bombards teens, particularly girls, with messages about what beauty is, every day. The youth education site Edutopia notes that this obsession with appearance can be physically, emotionally and economically damaging to women of all ages. The media bombardment also affects teenage boys, because media gives gives boys a skewed body image that they need to be taller, bigger or more muscular. An online program that lets teens make avatars of themselves can help teens learn about their perception of beauty. The avatars make their insecurities prominent, so that the teens can see, via an exaggerated image, that what they had thought would be attractive, is actually a distortion. The misconceptions of beauty that other teens have about themselves can help your teen appreciate his own outward beauty and that the media's idea of outward beauty is unrealistic.

Character

• Teach your teen that inner beauty is made up of character, which the teen must polish and refine as as outer beauty. Character is defined by virtues like honesty, compassion, fairness, responsibility, respect and perseverance. Dr. Michele Borba recommends that you talk to your child about his character traits and help him nurture the traits he should develop. Remind him that good character is to make the right decisions on his own, even if he decision may not be the popular thing to do. Achieving this will take hard work to recognize what appropriate behavior and action is in different situations.

Personality

• Personality is the inner spark that lights up your outer features. Teenagers are at a transitional phase in which they are still discovering who they are. Encourage your teenager to explore his personality and develop aspects of this as part of both his inner and outer beauty. Personality includes aspects such as creativity, wit, caring, strength, courage and humor. It also includes traits that he might see as weakness such as shyness, being bookish or being introverted. Teach your teen that it is important to use all of his personality traits to his advantage. Much like his outer, physical features, the features of his personality make up who he is and should be enhanced.