Beauty Come Forth: Unleash the Beauty Within

hough many will quickly state that beauty is only skin deep, outward attractiveness is often the first thing judged. People can become your friend or completely ignore you. However, the critical question is, does beauty attract and repel, or is there something deeper?
For Myra Wallace, designer, entrepreneur, owner and founder of the non-profit “Reap What U Sew,” (a program designed for creative youth), there definitely are better ways to make decisions about people. In Beauty Come Forth, Wallace stresses that the only way to judge someone is the way God judges. That is by first accepting that God makes no mistakes, therefore everyone is, “beautiful and wonderfully made.” In a woman to woman mini lecture format, Wallace distills sisterly advice into such familiar admonitions as, respect and accept yourself; do not wish to be other than you are, simply enhance what is already there; accept your physical self, but improve it; accept your biological self, but live healthy; and accept your psychological/emotional self, but enhance the positive and eliminate the negative.
These are Wallace’s messages throughout this self-help manual in which she offers her prescriptions for becoming beautiful and recognizing the ugliness in others as well as oneself. By following them, not only can one be beautiful, but they also can become fabulous. And fabulous is not simply a throw-away word for Wallace. Fabulous is an acronym: “Forgive, Accept, Believe, Understand, Love, Organize, Unleash, and Salute yourself.
Written primarily for the female audience, Beauty Come Forth, reads as an inspirational collection of sermonettes for the discouraged, down-trodden, disappointed, misdirected, looking for love in all the wrong places kind of woman that most everyone has been at sometime in their life. What makes this particular read a bit novel, is that Wallace frequently refers to the Bible and cites chapter and verse to underscore her views.
Approximately mid-way through, Wallace begins to give some practical and some philosophical advice for being beautiful: …”wear a ponytail. It is the only hairstyle that does not allow a woman to hide behind her hair …replace your toothbrush on a monthly basis …carve out at least 15 minutes of your day to do some kind of exercise … Tell yourself today, the buck stops here! …I am enough …Don’t let your beauty fade by taking on a bad attitude …You must stop and ask yourself, why would I want a man who knows my worth, yet does not respect it? …make out a weekly spending budget for money and for your time,” (examples given in the appendices). And so goes much of the book, suggestions followed by examples of what and how to feel and think in order to be beautiful inside and out.
Beauty Come Forth ends with two rather interesting lists of beauty tools, one spiritual (the Bible, prayer, anointed oils, etc.), and the other physical (formulas for cleansing various external beauty areas, skin, hair, teeth, etc.). Wallace’s goal is to make beauty a reality for all women, a beauty that others can see, the woman herself can acknowledge, and that God himself would approve.