Let’s swing to the other side and consider vanity. It’s not wrong for a woman to adorn herself, but the Bible does warn against the excess that results in immodest or ostentatious displays, or becomes a life-consuming pursuit. The Hebrew word that is translated as vain in the phrase “beauty is vain” is hebel, which means “emptiness or vanity, something transitory and unsatisfactory.” This is the same word that permeates the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is an exploration of the meaning of life, but by the second chapter, the writer has concluded that pleasure, laughter, hard work, homes, gardens, herds, servants, gold and silver, and even wisdom are hebel! This overstatement is effective, because the writer goes on to call hebel “striving after the wind.” Many good things are called hebel because we can’t grasp true satisfaction from these items any more than we can grasp the wind. There’s nothing wrong with these activities, but they won’t provide the fulfillment we often seek to derive from them.

In the same way, beauty is hebel. There’s nothing inherently wrong with beauty, but the meaning and fulfillment we seek in it will elude us like the wind through our fingers.

The Power of Beauty

If this is true, then why do we care so much about being beautiful? Why aren’t we content with the measure of attractiveness that God has given us? For one reason, because beauty has an effect on men. “In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty,” wrote American journalist Christopher Morley. Men notice beauty. They fight for the favor of a beautiful woman. They memorialize beauty in art. They write lyrical poetry about beauty.

 She walks in Beauty, like the night
 Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
 And all that’s best of dark and bright
 Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
 Thus mellowed to that tender light
 Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
 —George Gordon Byron

Every woman wants to elicit this kind of rhapsodic response from a man. That’s the second reason right there: “every woman wants.” Perhaps I would be more honest to say “craves” or “lusts after.”  As Joshua Harris writes, “A man is created to pursue and finds even the pursuit stimulating; a woman is made to want to be pursued and finds even being pursued stimulating. . . . Lust blurs and bends true masculinity and femininity in harmful ways. It makes a man’s good desire to pursue all about ‘capturing’ and ‘using,’ and a woman’s good desire to be beautiful all about ‘seduction’ and ‘manipulation.’ In general it seems that men and women are tempted by lust in two unique ways: men are tempted by the pleasure that lust offers, while women are tempted by the power lust promises.”