Improve Your Beauty: Cosmedic versus Cosmetic

Improve Your Beauty: Cosmedic versus Cosmetic

Think twice before choosing ways to improve your beauty. It should come more from the inside out than the outside in.

Cosmetic as an adjective is defined as involving or relating to treatment intended to restore or improve a person’s appearance. An example is cosmetic surgery. As a noun, it’s a product applied to the body, especially the face, to improve your beauty. Examples are makeup, beauty products and others used to enhance the appearance of the human body. Cosmetic made me think about how different the word’s meaning would be if we changed just one letter.

What if instead of being cosmetic, it was cosmedic? What if we viewed improving our body from the inside out rather than the outside in? What if instead of putting on foundation and makeup and blush that do not change or affect the body’s structure or function, we got more sleep, lowered our stress, exercised and ate healthier. All of those things would improve our appearance and our health. Using sunscreen would prevent skin damage and not smoking would protect our skin as well as our lungs.

Sometimes cosmetics are needed to cover a blemish or to add color or just to make a person look and feel better. But if we focused on improving our appearance from the inside out rather than the outside in, the cosmedic end result would be feeling and looking better at every age, and especially as we aged.

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