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Cooper 1
Jason Cooper
Professor Griffin
ENGL 1220
18 March 2017
Beauty Standards
Beauty is expressed through how an individual wants it to be. All beauty is, is a certain
shape, color, or form that pleases a person’s aesthetic sense. Many people strive to be as
beautiful as they can be no matter the cost. In the novel Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones, one of
the characters Chaurisse expresses, “There are two kinds of pretty, my mama always said.
Natural Beauty, which is whatever your mama gave you. Everybody can’t be that lucky, so for
us, there is Pretty in a Jar” (Jones 196). This philosophy is often expressed in society, as well as
the novel. People expect extreme beauty standards for themselves and if they do not see
themselves as pretty, they try to improve their appearance. The novel illustrates how beauty
affects people in various ways, like how Chaurisse runs her life on how she looks and judges
others on how they look, and how Gwendolyn sees opportunities to use her beauty as an
advantage over others.
Chaurisse shows many characteristics in her personality that she runs her life based on
her own beauty and other people’s beauty. She does not see herself to be beautiful and she finds
ways in order to make herself look better. She has a classification for when people are beautiful
to her and when they are not, and she calls these pretty people “Silver.” Chaurisse does not
classify herself as a “silver girl” though. One main flaw that she sees in herself is her hair and so
she puts fake hair in and she than expresses to herself, “Leaning my neck forward, I let the hair
swing forward before snapping it back. I smiled at my reflection and repeated the motion. It was
Cooper 2
beautiful, that hair” (Jones 197). She can only see herself as beautiful if she has the fake hair in
because her own natural hair was flawed to society’s view of what is beautiful. In an article
called “Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair?: African American Women and Their Struggles
with Beauty, Body Image, and Hair” by, Tracey Owens Patton, it is stated that, “What remains
consistent is that many notions of beauty are rooted in hegemonically defined expectations”
(Owens Patton 2). This is stating that in every culture, there is a set beauty standard that
everyone sees as beautiful. This statement from the article shares the notion with Chaurisse that
there is a beauty standard and everyone should be judged on it. Whenever someone challenges
this standard, she is left awestruck. When her friend Dana decided she wanted to chop off all of
her hair, Chaurisse could not believe it, “I think she was trying to figure out if Dana really was
thinking about cutting off all that gorgeous hair. Even caught up in a high ponytail, you could see
