Redefining Beautiful

I Tim 2:9-10:

Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.

I caught this story on Fox:

Pass the cold cream -- barefaced is the new black, baby!

At least it is at one Texas high school, where teenage girls have formed a group that celebrates going makeup free on Tuesdays.

Fed up with media portrayals of young girls wearing revealing clothes and caked-on makeup, Colleyville Heritage High School students Samantha Gibbs, Lauren Gilby, Nina Smith, Emily Gates, Laura Kelly, and Caroline Tessler founded Redefining Beautiful, a group celebrating natural beauty and self-confidence.

Here’s a picture

On the one hand, I’m encouraged that that someone wants to call a truce in the clothes and cosmetics arms race among high school girls.  But on the other, it’s not clear that these girls are redefining much of anything.  On the contrary, most of the girls in this picture are in the very flower of their natural beauty by its existing definition.  What’s changed is that they are not dressing in ways that signal sexual availability, but that isn’t the same thing, and every high school boy knows it.

So, what are we looking at here?  Are these girls making a genuine effort to “clothe themselves in good works”?  Are they opening a new front in the high school status war by declaring, “We can look beautiful without makeup”?

Like all things, it’s probably a bit of both, but determining the ratio depends on whether the girls shown in this picture are representative of the level of female pulchritude among teen girls in general, or whether we are looking only at girls that can pull off a no-makeup day successfully.