What Meets The Eye Analysis

At first, it may seem shallow to care a whole lot about one’s appearance, but according to Daniel Akst’s essay “What Meets the Eye”, we learn that in many ways, appearances actually serve as a source of inequality. In his expository piece, Akst probes into the importance of appearances in our society today; he explores the role that beauty plays in everyday life and and how it influences society. Akst makes numerous interesting discoveries on the role of appearances in society, but several of his arguments don’t seem to be well-argued.
According to Akst, people nowadays are becoming more and more obsessed with how they look. Because people care so much about appearances, the beauty and cosmetic surgery industry have been booming. His research shows that the number of cosmetic surgeries have gone up 24% from 2000 to 2012 (Akst 332). Even the media industry profits off of our insecurities, as their ideals of beauty are becoming more and more impossible to attain. People of all ages spend money buying products that are unnecessary in an attempt to live up to the standards the media sets for us. But why do people spend so much time and effort on their looks?
One of the main reasons that Akst believes that people choose to present themselves the way they do is for status; people may dress a
After doing some more research, I realized that appearance discrimination is very common, especially in the workplace. In his paper, Akst stated that “plain people earn less than people of average looks, who earn less than the good-looking” (Akst 336). However, this seems to be a very subjective means of measurement, which makes his proof seem quite weak. In fact, the entire idea of measuring one’s attractiveness seems to be very abstract and opinion-based, which is why conducting more research from more sources may be