Devoid of makeup, with natural hair and the body of a woman half her age, 51-year-old Chilean-born yogini Satya Katiza Ivulic radiates the quality of beauty that many women aspire to. A yoga teacher trainer of international standing, most recently on-staff at Bali’s exclusive Como Shambala Estate, Satya has a contagious enthusiasm, femininity and warmth that inspires her many students.

“What I see when a woman has beauty is that she shines from the inside through her eyes and skin,” Satya explains. “It’s the way she uses her words and moves her body. It’s an inner connection and that’s beautiful. That is a very profound place in herself where she moves from. It’s like having a crown on your head, full of light.”

For Satya, beauty doesn’t have any proportions or special look. She says, “It’s very beautiful when a woman knows how to use clothes, fabric and jewellery with sensitivity. It’s the state of being in communion with everything a woman does — with harmony, grace and connection.” When a woman is truly radiant, the quality of beauty is unmistakable. Luminous and expansive, she is magnetic, lovely and sexually attractive.

Yet in the pursuit of being beautiful, the over-identification with the physical form has moved us away from the inner qualities that create the glow of beauty in the first place. In order to reconnect with the essence of beauty, it’s helpful to investigate points of disconnection.

Umberto Eco opens On Beauty, a historical survey of the Western idea of beauty, with a declaration that “‘Beautiful’ — together with ‘graceful’ and ‘pretty’, or ‘sublime’, ‘marvellous’, ‘superb’ and similar expressions — is an adjective we often employ to indicate something that we like.” In many Western and non-Western societies women have been deemed desirable or good according to their physical beauty, as defined by the dominant culture. To be beautiful, therefore, has become interlinked with what is good, what we like and what we would like to have for ourselves.

Appearance thus conforms to sets of ever-changing socio-cultural ideals, which are arbitrary and, in the contemporary world, largely driven by market forces. In a world that overvalues physical attributes, a woman’s beauty can dramatically impact on her marriage and partnership prospects. The more she fits into what is deemed attractive and sexually potent, the more desirable she is with greater prospects for her to secure a high-status partner.

Her beauty thus becomes her currency (which is why so many women want it), enabling her greater ease of access to wealth, status and power — both her own and her partner’s. Generally speaking, her prospects of employment and social popularity tend to increase the more attractive she is.

This also works in reverse with women who are outside “beauty norms”. In 2006, a New York study found that obesity was associated with a 16 per cent reduction in women’s probability of marriage, an 18 per cent reduction in women’s wages and a 25 per cent reduction in women’s family incomes. High-fashion models, who are selected entirely for their appearance, actors and celebrities feed the media and set the tone of the look for women across the globe.

Swedish former international model, 26-year-old Lisa, travelled across the globe between the ages of 16 and 22 and worked in front of the camera. She typifies the modelling world’s checklist: blonde, willowy with a balletic gait, her long eyelashes framing pools of blue and contrasting with perfect milky skin. Lisa’s professional and personal values, however, are not-so-typical. They reveal a woman with a rich inner life and strong self-worth. No longer working as a model, Lisa is more interested in a deeper level of beauty — both her own and those around her.

“True beauty is reflected in a women’s whole being and I believe that beauty is created from within,” she says. “The women who are beautiful have strength and confidence in who they are. They are passionate, intelligent, confident and also loving, kind and considerate. Love and the belief in yourself and others as well as the ability to be happy and positive create this beauty — these traits are reflected on the outside.”

Ambivalent about the benefits of modelling, she notes that the aesthetic criteria of models’ ethnicity and cultural background and the masculinisation of women is also trend-based and changes frequently. “These are very superficial traits. It’s got nothing to do with personality, background or who you are,” she says. “You don’t have much say about how you are perceived. You are the image that’s selling and they [the fashion world and media] do what they want with it; they create the standard. The standard for models is that they need big eyes and lips, defined bone structure, flawless skin and height that starts at 177cm,” she explains. “If a woman is taller, she is more fascinating.

“Models need to be very slim and slightly androgynous, which is why very young girls are used because they haven’t yet developed the full female body shape. The clothes are only made in the sample size, which is a small European 34 [Australian size 4–6]. The models need to fit these.”

Lisa’s revelations of other people’s negative reactions to her physical beauty when growing up are poignant. This experience is unspoken yet common for many young women. Jealousy, taunting, social exclusion and gossiping in young women reveal disturbing distortions in perception, which derive from ambivalent relationships to social ideals of what women “should” look like and the enormous gap between that and how they actually appear.

Not only does this indicate projection of their own insecurities and discomfort with another woman’s beauty but it also highlights a lack of self-acceptance and not feeling innately beautiful in oneself. In 2005, a study in 10 countries commissioned by Dove surveyed 3300 girls and women between the ages of 15 and 64. The resulting publication, Beyond Stereotypes, found that 90 per cent of these women wanted to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance, with bodyweight ranking the highest.

Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, succinctly identifies the root cause of distortions of beauty and what this does to women’s psyches: “When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behaviour, they are captured in both body and soul and are no longer free.”

Single culturally ascribed ideals of beauty and behaviour, particularly those around youthfulness and thin bodies, breed distortions that manifest in eating disorders, excessive use of cosmetic surgery, anxiety, depression and more. So many women struggle, to their detriment, to fit unattainable notions of size, weight and shape to conform to this ideal. The Beyond Stereotypes study also found that 67 per cent of all women aged 15 to 64 withdraw from life-engaging activities due to feeling badly about their looks.

While some women withdraw, others simply change their looks. With an annual turnover in the vicinity of $1 billion, cosmetic surgery in Australia is big business. In 2009, Australia was ranked in the top 25 countries in the International Survey on Aesthetic/Cosmetic Procedures performed.

The pursuit of the androgenised whippet-thin body has led to an epidemic of young women (and some young men) dieting and starving themselves. After obesity and asthma, anorexia nervosa is the third most common chronic illness for adolescent girls in Australia. Of the 14,686 women aged 18–23 years surveyed in The Australian Longitudinal Study of Women’s Health, two-thirds of them had a BMI within a healthy weight range but only one-fifth of these women were happy with their weight.