I work at a Hispanic advertising agency that primarily focuses attention on multicultural, socio-economic issues that prevail in today's society and that avidly works to support those individuals and unities bringing about positive cause and action within those impactful issues. From this, I get a first-hand look at the hot button issues that individuals are so passionate about voicing.

One dominant issue, for example, is racism - racism, prejudice, inferiority, all the same, but equally hurtful. So, I began to ponder about the roots of this particular injustice and the reasons for a person to cast inferiority, or superiority, against certain individuals. Racism, sexism and classism are products (I believe) that stem from people who support, and have supported for centuries, an 'ideal' image within society.

I randomly stumbled upon the latest news topic: Twiggy's air brushed photo for Proctor & Gamble product Oil of Olay. This photograph caused a huge stir because it's not a real image; it's been "tampered" with. Then I recalled the recent May 2009 NYtimes.com article where photographer Peter Lindbergh shot a series of covers for French Vogue that caused a stir because they included no airbrushing. But, since we live in an image-based society because of the media shoving it in our faces, people want that perfect beauty. Whether it's the color of your skin, gender, or particular class, there is an ideal image to uphold and people frown upon you if you don't fit that description.

The theory of beauty, which is studied with aesthetics, was no doubt a phenomenal aspect of Ancient Greece as evident from the works of the earliest Western philosophers. Socrates viewed beauty as a product of the good, serving a rational end upon the security or the fulfillment of man. Plato viewed beauty as associated with things, and the emotional, sensuous pleasures those things induced within the person. Plato believed in an absolute beauty, a purity, as associated with the true and the good, very much like Socrates.

Furthermore, and similar to the minds of the Western philosophers, the architecture of Ancient Greece was built upon symmetry and proportion, which coincided to the principles of beauty and attractiveness. Buildings of equal harmony were more pleasing than those not, and suggested the absence of defects. The ancient Greek word for beautiful, came from the concept of, "being of one's hour," a ripe, youthful age. Strikingly, hundreds of years have passed, and cultures around the world, especially the American culture, have clung to the beauty concept, only it has become a theme of survival, a driving force of materialism and superficialism that harbors human life.

To complement my train of thought is Nancy Etcoff's 1999 book "Survival of the Prettiest." This book ascertains the modern culture of beauty, explains why people are infatuated with it, why people value it, why and how it drives them, and how it has become the epitome of human identity.

Etcoff explains beauty as residing in the mind, in the imagination, so as to recognize an ideal beautiful human form when paths crossed, though no manner of manipulation can create a human incarnation. "Looking to the object of beauty, we confront centuries of struggle to capture beauty's essence" (Etcoff 9). As stated directly pertaining to magazines and cinema, images of beauty are created out of parts of many, with no beautiful wholes. Models and actresses in the earlier years needed a double that had beautiful parts to complement their parts, to create the most pleasing image as possible. Now, technologies such as airbrushing and digital alterations make it possible to alter and perfect images without the need for a double. Airbrushing and digital alterations rule the majority of magazines and commercials people see in today's society.

People care so much to keep an ideal image because they want to find a perfect mate. People want to improve social status, money, love and overcome the scrutinizing gazes of other people, whether it's envious or admirable.

American culture usurps an image-based, materialistic, expensive and unsympathetic society. The media propagandizes beauty in the most torturous, yet influential of ways, sucking in every living human, especially women. The message that the media displays so heartily, and plagues everyone's minds, is the world revolves primarily on pretty, fit, individuals - "survival of the prettiest."

To conclude, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. And if people can look a little deeper in the eyes of other people, they will understand that they are just another person equally trying to keep to an image to survive in this world. Whether they are Caucasian, Latin American, Asian or African American, all individuals have a unique beauty that makes them different from everyone else, gives them identity.

People need to put aside, the media's 'ideal' image and empathize with their fellow human beings. What is superiority? Is it real? Or just an image created by powers that be.