Since living in Tulum, I have happened upon at least half a dozen photo shoots, some rather curious…

…and others, a truly fascinating glimpse into just how natural the “natural beauty” presented to us in “blemish”-free, “sun”-kissed, and “wind”-swept advertisements really is. The common thread through each encounter? I was never once struck by the attractiveness or sex appeal of the supermodel, but each time amused by the fumbling and adjusting and wiggling that had to happen in order to capture that stranded-on-a-tropical-island-without-a-toothbrush-but-still-kissable-as-ever look that marketers pay millions to pull off and consumers pay billions in (mostly futile) attempts to obtain.

A few weeks back, I decided to ditch the laptop and write on the beach. Notebook, pencil and camera (always) at the ready, I rode my cruiser the twenty-five minutes to the shore, parked myself in the shade of a palapa and opened myself to inspiration. Little did I know it was to appear in the form of a 6’2″ copper-toned teen, her gear-laden entourage of photographers and makeup artists and a florescent assortment of Brazilian bikinis.

For the next two hours, the four of them put on quite a show, not only for me, but for the rest of the suddenly-less-sleepy beach goers, the mildly-interested wait staff and a displaced Chiapan purse peddler. 

Averaging about forty “sexy” stances per minute (heck yeah, I counted), the gangly youth (the model, not the peddler) thrust her hips, pursed her lips, flung her hair and caressed her cleavage like some kind of spastic, egomaniacal wind-up toy whose inventor loved porn second only to caffeine.

{I’m choosing not to show you the model as making fun of her is not my point.}

But try as I did to see the sex appeal she was clearly attempting to convey, all I saw was a young woman freaked out by seaweed, worried over the unruly way of the wind with her hair, concerned that her boobs were only mostly revealed by the orange sherbet push up and three diligent devotees fighting physics in order to keep her upright in heals on sand.

And though “ridiculous” is more the adjective that comes to mind when I think of how she looked, I did see beauty that afternoon. In fact, there was plenty of it, all around her:

• In the way her trusty attendant admired the sandpipers while she held the girl’s towel during a swimsuit change.
• In the way the woman holding the sail-like light reflector was able to laugh at herself as she attempted to tame the wind.
• In the playfulness of a mother making sandcastles with her kid.
• In the indiscriminate and obvious love for children by their nannies, however underpaid.
• And in the relief on the face of the Chiapan girl when I knew where she was from based on the embroidery on her blouse.

Can you imagine the shift in cultural consciousness if we all simply defined beauty for ourselves?

But I see an even larger dilemma in the making than the millions spent by marketers to train our eyes away from the beauty all around us and toward the deceptive promises of their products — and that is that we’re now selling the same fallacy to each other without even realizing it.

Take my current Facebook profile pic, for example, cause I’m guilty, too:

Not bad, huh? Good light, gorgeous backdrop, comfortable expressions and decent tans. So what’s the big deal? It is real, right? I mean we really live near the beach and our hair is really messy from ocean breezes and those highlights are really there thanks to the Caribbean sun.

Except that if you were to look at this photo without knowing much about us and create a story about our lives based on what you imagine, you would likely miss the mark entirely.

For one, even though I don’t “touch up” my photos (as a matter of principle), cropping alone reduces reality:

Two, you would have no idea how many unflattering shots it took to get one good one…

Three, you’d never guess that my sly smile was due to the likelihood of cilantro in my teeth from the ceviche I had just eaten…

And last but definitely not least, you’d have no idea who was behind the camera…

So, let’s try this little exercise again. Here’s a photo of me with my first born that got a lot of attention as her FB profile pic (post editing).

But again, zoom out a little, add the “blemishes” back in and remove the Instagram filter and suddenly, we’re back on planet earth as mother and daughter on a beach…

*A Quick Tangent: As fun as I know Instagram to be (as well as all other instantaneous photo enhancement tools), it concerns me that my kids will all grow up filtering reality to this degree, then presenting their lives to each other slightly enhanced. I mean, I realize I’m coming from a generation raised on film cameras, but I simply can’t see how it would have served me to enhance that period of my life…

Anyway, scroll through the dozens of other shots we took that day…

And you’ll see what a couple of dorks we really are when you get us together. Even still, you would have no idea of the depth of our story:

Like the fact that I only get to see my baby girl a handful of weeks a year. Or that she rips off a chunk of my heart and takes it with her every time she returns to Pennsylvania. That she has overcome all kinds of obstacles in order to be able to laugh like that again, and that my parents were not only right behind us eating ceviche when these pictures were taken, but that they are my biggest heros ever for letting her live with them and loving her as she’s healed.

By focusing so heavily as a culture on images and photos and the partial truths of other peoples’ lives, we detract from the real beauty of our own stories, which can only be experienced firsthand.

So, I encourage you — the next time you find yourself longing for what someone else has deemed a “beach body”…

or coveting a friend’s recent camping trip…

or wishing you could actually live at Anthropologie…

…zoom out a little, add the blemishes back in, imagine that supermodel hurling rice cakes into the toilet and then ask yourself:

• What is my brand of beautiful?
• What is the unique version of stunning only I can offer the world?
• What is beautiful in my immediate proximity right now?

For THIS is where the ultimate beauty lies — in the truest expression of you, unfiltered.