VBB 305: Barbara McBean — Inside You Is Where Eternal Beauty Comes From!

Intro [00:00:01]:

Virgin Beauty Bitch Podcast: inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share unique life experiences without fear of being defiantly different. Your hosts, Christopher and Heather.

Let's talk, shall we?

Christopher [00:00:20]:

Beauty. It is natural, and it is real. We are all born with a natural appreciation for beauty but are also subject to social constructs that tell us who is beautiful. And, in most cultures, that burden falls on women who are called on to fit a profile that we see every day on magazine covers, on the silver screen, on television, and pretty much every product that wants our attention or our money. Many girls grow up wanting to fit that profile, including our guest, President, and Founder of Eternal Beauty Institute, Barbara McBean. Welcome back, Barbara, to Virgin Beauty Bitch.

Barbara McBean [00:01:02]:

Thank you for having me.

Christopher [00:01:03]:

Oh, it is absolutely, deeply our pleasure. Now, Barbara, we want to really thank you for joining us as we peel back the layers of this mystery we call beauty. And serendipitously, I read a post recently that said this: "I want to apologize to all the women I have called beautiful before I call them intelligent or brave. I am sorry I made it sound as though something as simple as what you're born with is all you have to be proud of." The author of that quote is Barbara Lynn McBean. Barbara, as a woman who I bet has heard the words 'you are beautiful' more than a few times, do you remember the first time you said that quote or used those words on yourself?

Barbara McBean [00:01:50]:

Yeah, absolutely. I think once I really realized that the colleges that I had founded were starting to take off and it was going to be a real thing, I started to realize I had the ability to build something really spectacular. But before that, I had doubts. I had self-doubts. And I think that everybody, regardless of gender, harbors these doubts inside. And, you know, we were always searching for that value proposition. You know, what, what makes us valuable, and I think as women, it is difficult because so much of what we've been taught from a very young age is that, you know, you have to be a pretty little girl and, you know, to find a husband or to get that great job or those, you know, whatever it is, the big, beautiful house, the picket fence, you want to be an aesthetically pleasing looking woman. And there's a lot of pressure that comes with that, that I don't feel necessarily is pushed on to the male gender as much as a male gender.

Christopher [00:03:04]:

I would agree 100,000%.

Barbara McBean [00:03:09]:

Yeah, I mean, you guys can be cute. You can roll out of bed with scruffy hair and put on, you know, whatever t-shirt was on the floor and rock that with your skateboard or whatever it is and, you know, as the female population will be, oh, yeah, that guy's cute. But you, I don't feel like, from a woman's standpoint, that we have that same ease with how we can enter into society at large.

Heather [00:03:36]:

I love that quote that Christopher just read and how powerful those words are. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you've reconciled the pressure that women feel? On a personal note, with other pieces that are not things that you're born with, but things like characteristic traits that are cultivated, like being brave and growing from the inside out.

Barbara McBean [00:04:06]:

Absolutely. One of the things that, you know, I've talked to my girlfriends and other women about as, you know, as we age as well. Right. Because, of course, beauty and age, as we age further and further into the distance, the beauty tends to. Or society's perspective of beauty is that it lessens. Right. And I always say, if that's the only horse you're betting on, you're betting on a losing horse because you want to be for your reasons, not for anybody else, but for your reasons, you want to be as dynamic as possible and, you know, really stretch the breadth of your character and soul. And that means that you don't look in the mirror so much.

Barbara McBean [00:04:50]:

Don't worry about it. You know, do the things that fill your soul and make you proud of yourself. And that takes a little bit of bravery because, you know, a lot of these things that we are doing as women now aren't traditional female roles and actually have been shunned, or we weren't allowed to be in those roles. So I often go back, and I had a really amazing set of grandmothers growing up on both sides, both very strong, independent women who taught me a lot about women's rights and what women had to go through so that would be their mothers to go through just to be able to be a person. And that is because they continually drilled it into me that this is not a God-given right. This is not a God-given right; you can have a job, or you can play soccer, or whatever it is. This is something that women fought extremely hard for. And you're now on this very small, you know, not small, but you're on the precipice of this just opening up because it's so new.

Barbara McBean [00:05:52]:

If we look at the whole span of history or recorded history, women have really only had rights for the last hundred years or so. Right?

Christopher [00:06:01]:

I'm curious. You're a beautiful woman. Do women resent the message coming from a beautiful woman that they don't necessarily need to look beautiful to be their potential?

Barbara McBean [00:06:15]:

You know what? Of course. I mean, everybody's going to project whatever is inside of them. So if they do not feel that they are beautiful, they're going to project anger or frustration or whatever judgment on others. And the thing that I've learned about being in this human suit, you know what? It happens to look good. I'm not frustrated with it. You know,  I like the way I look, but I wasn't always super attractive. So I've had that dichotomy of being both. When I was younger, I had severe, severe acne, like cystic acne, that was all over my face, chest, and back. And I was a little bit chubbier.

Barbara McBean [00:07:00]:

I was that proverbial geek or nerd in school for the entire span of my school years. And I wasn't attractive. So I was like the opposite. No guys would date me. No guys would dance with me at the dances, those kind of things. And so I understood life from that perspective, and I understood not, you know, certainly having people make fun of me or say that I wasn't attractive or. I remember one particular time I was actually at the Talisman Center or one of the pools in Calgary. I think it was the Talisman Center, but I don't know what they call it now. And these young boys that were in my grade, you know, were in the pool.

Barbara McBean [00:07:42]:

They happened to be there at the same time with their families. I was there with my family, and they were saying, oh, my God, she's so ugly. You know, I'd never really conceptualized that as a young person before. Like, what does that mean, that I'm ugly? Like, I'd, you know, you get up in the morning, you're a young kid, you brush your hair, you're a little chubby and pimply and whatever, but you still fun, right? You don't really dissect things too much. And that was the first moment that I dissected. What does it mean that they're saying I'm ugly? And I remember kind of getting out of the pool and slopping my way back to the changing room and looking in the mirror and like, oh, you know, maybe I am ugly. You know, like, it never occurred to me before. And so I guess those early experiences shaped my understanding of, you know, we really decide.

Barbara McBean [00:08:33]:

And I think even thinking back to that moment, I had no conception of whether I was pretty or ugly or what I was before that. And it was that defining moment where I started to actually compartmentalize or shuffle things around as, oh, well, that would be a pretty thing, and that would be a not pretty thing. And, you know, what have you? I think all human beings teach themselves to do that or put things in different buckets or categories. As I've aged, I realize that It's really not fruitful because everything in life, every creation, every person, every creature is intrinsically beautiful, just unique. They have their own unique beauty.

Heather [00:09:14]:

Would you dive a little deeper into that for us, the intrinsically, you know, in essence, beautiful? Can you expand on that a little for us? It's so beautifully said.

Barbara McBean [00:09:23]:

Yeah, absolutely. When we think of beauty or the reflection of beauty, because, of course, we are the observer, and we're looking out into the world and perceiving. So we're perceiving what we feel is beautiful. And usually, beauty should be associated with what brings us joy or what is uplifting. Right? High vibrational. And so you can see that in everything if you choose to see it in everything. If you look at your grandmother and see her smiling at her birthday cake, or you look at your dog, and your dog is hairy and slobbery and everything else, but you look at your dog, and that is one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen, and you go out and you.

Barbara McBean [00:10:10]:

You look at a tree, or you look at a park, and it's beautiful. And so we can find so many examples of what is beautiful. But when it comes to the masculine and the feminine division of beauty, or human construction of what is accurately beauty, I think we really confuse it. Some of it's confused, obviously, with this idea of sexuality. So what we find sexually enticing, or whatever that is, then we've equated that to beauty. But again, I think it comes back to using our God-given intelligence and starting to really self-assess some of our beliefs. Why wouldn't we want to see a beautiful world? And I think it's a choice. I think a lot of individuals, whether it's that they're into conspiracy theories or they're into that, let's jump on the negativity bandwagon or whatever, they choose to see the world through the lens of ugliness. And that's something that I've never done.

Barbara McBean [00:11:16]:

I wake up in the morning, and everything is beautiful, and everybody is beautiful. And back to your question. I teach so many young people. And there's such a large number of young people coming through our colleges and a lot of them, they're in that stage where self-esteem, and they're not sure of themselves, and they don't feel beautiful, or they're questioning their value through the lens of, am I beautiful or am I not? And they're all beautiful. It doesn't matter which one I look at, especially when I'm teaching. And I look out into all of the sea of faces.

Barbara McBean [00:12:00]:

Wow. How beautiful is life? How beautiful are these young individuals who are hungry for knowledge that is the bedrock of the next generation? It's just. It's so beautiful. So, you know, that's kind of my perspective.

Christopher [00:12:15]:

I want to reflect and echo what you just said with one of the greatest minds to ever live on this planet earth. It was Plato, the Greek Philosopher, who equated beauty with the virtues of truth and goodness. And maybe in nature, beauty is truth, and maybe in our hearts, beauty is good. These are my words to his. But have we perverted its purity with lust and greed?

Barbara McBean [00:12:45]:

I think that absolutely there could be a connection with that. I think how we can really see that visually in our external world is to look at social media. We have all of these apps, and we have all of these avenues like plastic surgery. Contort your body with this app. Make yourself look different than you actually do. Okay, fine. But what happens when you actually meet the person? If everything that you're doing is filtering yourself out, you don't look like that.

Barbara McBean [00:13:18]:

And how is that cultivating real self-esteem? And then also, you know, we have a society that is continually disconnecting, and our consciousness is retreating into this virtual world. Now, I'm not going to sit in judgment and say that's a terrible thing because the foundation of what I believe is no lesson or no path is terrible. All lessons lead to or yield learning. But sometimes the learning is a difficult lesson. And I think what we're seeing right now in society is disconnection. So because we've plugged into something else, instead of human connection and truth and purity, we're getting a lot of this more dark connection, which is a selfish connection. It is a vain connection, an unrealistic connection, because we're associating this vanity with something that doesn't even exist. So it's superfluous; it's not real.

Barbara McBean [00:14:25]:

And so what happens is it actually doesn't help our self-esteem. It lowers it because it's not real. It's not based on truth, and we will not be able to achieve some pixelated version of ourselves. It's just, it'll never be, I mean, unless. I'm in the beauty industry, so I see myriads of women who have gone through extensive plastic surgery procedures, lots of them, to try to achieve this ideal. And it doesn't look good in real life. Like, you can take a picture of it, and you can filter it and everything else, but when you are standing next to them. And look, I've had a few things done. I'm not going to sit here and say, you know, I'm completely natural because that would be bogus.

Barbara McBean [00:15:14]:

I've had, you know, breast augmentation. But mind you, I had it when I was 15. I didn't do it with the mind that I have now. Had I waited and been a little bit more patient with things, I would not have had it done. It is what it is now. I'm not going to go messing around and having surgeries and backing my way out of it. But I do know that when your focus or the focus of the female segment of the population is only directed to what they look like, we have a very superficial society that isn't based on the foundations of love or truth.

Christopher [00:16:00]:

That is very powerful. And I would be really remiss if we didn't explore that dark side of beauty. I recently read Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth. Have you read that?

Barbara McBean [00:16:10]:

I haven't, no.

Christopher [00:16:11]:

So basically, she is speaking from the perspective of beauty being used to control women. I'll read you a quote from her book. A woman's primary social value, once defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, has been redefined by the beauty myth as an attachment to virtuous beauty. The beauty myth was created to checkmate power at every level in individual women's lives. And the contemporary ravages of beauty continue to destroy women physically and deplete them psychologically, basically echoing what you just said.

Barbara McBean [00:16:53]:

And that's the thing, and I've seen it. Right. So the women that, and I want to talk about aging, right? Because we all, women and men, have that sort of bubble phase in between, you know, 16 and 40 to 45, 50, depending on how you've lived. If you haven't partied too hard or whatever, where your body looks good, you're in your prime, and it almost feels like you can do no wrong. That's also where a lot of individuals don't grow. They become very stagnant. They don't create new avenues to stretch themselves to grow themselves. And those avenues create self-love.

Barbara McBean [00:17:35]:

Because when you're passionate about whether it's sports or some sort of hobby, whatever it is, you, you feel. You feel. You fill your soul essentially, right? And so what you, what I've seen in society or, you know, just the human race as a whole, you'll get to that certain stage. And if individuals have not invested in themselves and created and cultivated a myriad of things that makes them really love themselves and be happy, you know, regardless of who they're with, their family dynamic, what's going on in their life, they end up feeling very personally bankrupt. And unfortunately, those are a lot of the individuals that have spent their life partying, you know, in the party scene with their friends, not really too much self-development and really kind of floating on their looks or floating on their youth, because I believe everyone's beautiful in their own way, but they're floating on that youthful, you know, fun-loving energy. And then all of a sudden, like, it's like a deer in the headlights, there's the wrinkles, there's, you know, the body is not acting the same. And they can't keep up with the 20 and 30-year-olds who are in the new era of youthful beauty. And all of a sudden, they're looking in the mirror, and they don't really like what they see because they've wasted this time not really getting to know themselves.

Barbara McBean [00:18:59]:

And so I think, again, part of this beauty myth or part of the, I think what has plagued women especially for so long is this idea that keep investing in your beauty, you'll always have a great life. If you look good, keep a perky bosom and a nice backside, and make sure you look fresh for your husband or whatever that is. But it's not true. Just even look at infidelity. If you go back to the early years when women were truly domesticated and mostly stayed at home, you were the good girl who baked the biscuits and, you know, put the dinner on the table for your husband to come home to. I mean, there was massive infidelity back then, you know, but it just was under the rug. It was just like, well, you know, there's these boys clubs and this and that.

Barbara McBean [00:19:49]:

And one of the things that, especially in my younger days, I did a lot of waitressing or would you like sort of like serving girl kind of thing, but also for private events. And this was another, you know, eye-opening thing for me because oil and gas were booming in Calgary. There's all these private men club men's clubs. And, of course, what went on behind the scenes in these clubs was ridiculous. And I'm sure the wives didn't know about it. And, you know, they're buying these young girls, these young girls, or whether they're topless. Like I didn't do any of that type of work, but I worked with girls from the agency that did that, and I was blown away. And I just thought, wow, you know, this stuff happens, and this is real, like real life, and these guys don't feel guilty about this.

Barbara McBean [00:20:35]:

Like, and, you know, it was the whole gamut. It was the young businessmen all the way up to the old grandpas. Right? So, you know, it's all kind of about educating ourselves. And I think this kind of brings us up to an interesting point of with women's liberation; we are really opening the doors to a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes that probably wasn't so great before, too. So we're in that era of readjusting the pendulum, so to speak, in terms of morality, I think.

Heather [00:21:05]:

Would you mind also letting our viewers, who may be tuning in for the first time and haven't watched our other show with you? Can you let us know a little bit about your business and what it's all about?

Barbara McBean [00:21:17]:

Yeah, so I have a chain of colleges. We teach aesthetics and medical aesthetics throughout Canada, and we do have regional courses or courses that are sort of summit-based in the US as well. And that chain of companies is Eternal Beauty Institutes. I also have several medical centers as of 2024 that are based on regenerative medicine. So, I've teamed up with a great group of medical professionals around North America to open up these medical centers. Again, it's all about being the best that you can be and having treatment plans where essentially you come in to see our professionals once a month, and we help you with the anti-aging process internally, externally, mentally, on an ongoing basis so that hopefully there is no degeneration, you know, that is creeping up on you by surprise. You know, we treat joint pain, arthritis, all of these different things. So it is a collaborative medical approach.

Barbara McBean [00:22:27]:

Obviously, I'm not a doctor, but I've had blessings in terms of my corporate life, and now I'm joining with all of these fantastic medical minds to bring this new platform. It's called Eternal Beauty Medical Centers. And right now, we do have four of them. So Regina, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto are opening up shortly here. Yeah, so that's basically the basis of my daily life.

Christopher [00:22:56]:

I really love that in that you're not damning the way that a person wants to look, but you're educating them that there are foundations to this, that you need to take care of, that you need to be wary of that. Add to that external expression. I really love that whole structure 100%.

Barbara McBean [00:23:21]:

And I think it all comes back to love because we deal with, and I don't mean deal with, but we have the pleasure of learning from, especially the students. Okay. Because it's a different era for them, nonbinary. And there are people, you know, who are transitioning. I know that, especially in terms of, and I don't want to call it an old dogma, but there's a lot of that old consciousness that resides in judgment. And so when we reside in judgment, we're going to point fingers, and we're going to say, well, that's bad, or that's evil, or whatever it is.

Barbara McBean [00:24:00]:

But if we can tilt our perception, and I'm always like, look, we're a college, we're an educational facility, and we have to open our doors, and we are honored to open our doors to every type of person, no matter what their sexual orientation, no matter where they're coming from, what they see. I cannot jump into another person's mind and tell you what they're going through, but I can tell you that young people nowadays struggle, and I see many things from our administrative end. You know, it's difficult for them. And then you layer all of this dogma and all of these pre-judgments, and you have a little, you know, you have a young person sitting in your office that's telling you they're suicidal. They don't love themselves.

Barbara McBean [00:24:51]:

They don't understand why their brain is feeling this way. And you expect me to throw some book at them or tell them they need to be like this and, you know, stop that. No, you can't do that. You know, you have to come from a place of love. What I realize about beauty and what we have constructed in terms of what's right and what's wrong and beauty or this and that is that it's really just made up. Everything is made up. And when you understand that we used to be Neanderthals dragging our knuckles on the ground, and we made this whole world up, and we can make it however we want.

Barbara McBean [00:25:22]:

And if the very foundational principles of what we are making are what we are seeing, our projection is based on acceptance and love. And that doesn't mean that if somebody is chopping the legs off a cat, that's okay. You know, that isn't okay because that's not based in love, right? If we are loving to others, we are also elevating life to its highest pillar or highest standard in the sense that we honor life as it is unfolding. And, again, it is difficult. I try to ride that middle road because I know that you're always going to offend somebody. Even when I'm at a dinner party or what have you, I'm never going to be the person that says, this is the right way, or, you know, this is my opinion, or it has to be this way because what I've learned in my 40 years is that my opinion changes. So, what I might have thought was definite in my twenties is definitely not the same in my forties.

Heather [00:26:43]:

In this episode, we've discussed many different layers to the question I'm going to ask you. But I'd like to ask this question specifically for the series we're doing right now: What does beauty mean to you?

Barbara McBean [00:26:57]:

Beauty, to me, is what the world should be. The world that each and every human being, and I'm going to go beyond that, each and every life should be able to experience a beautiful existence. Part of what makes the journey beautiful is that each and every one of us has the ability to contribute to that culmination of what beauty is. I think a really good indicator of being in beauty and being surrounded by beauty is joy. If you are joyful, if you wake up every day and your heart is filled with love and you are emanating this amazing life force, it's not a selfish thing, it's not a prideful thing. It is absolutely a purposeful thing. Because when you are joyful, you're also on purpose.

Barbara McBean [00:28:01]:

And I think any of the great minds or any of the really impactful people that have lived will tell you that there is no greater feeling than knowing one's purpose. And so I'm going to also tether that to beauty.

Christopher [00:28:19]:

I quoted one of the greatest minds in human history earlier, Plato, and I don't know. What would you say is your title? What is your title these days?

Barbara McBean [00:28:33]:

My official title is Jack of all trades. I don't know. I feel I've reached a point in my career where I'm just in service. I don't need money anymore. I've achieved all of the benchmarks of that younger, business-hungry individual that wants, you know, all of the glamorous material things I have; those things, they're not terrible. They're not. They don't make you happy either, you know? And I think it's great to have gone through this leg of the journey because you really realize what is real, you know, where that point of center is for yourself.

Christopher [00:29:24]:

The reason I ask you the question is that I wanted to add philosopher to your title.

Barbara McBean [00:29:30]:

Oh, okay.

Christopher [00:29:31]:

Because a lot of how you speak and the way that you see the world around you, it's philosophy. It's not about judgment. It's not about valuing this or valuing that. It's about philosophy. It's about looking forward and seeing the greater in everything and everyone, the universe in general. And to me, that's how you speak.

Barbara McBean [00:29:57]:

Well, and I've always had that perspective from a young person. And I don't know, and everybody, again, the consciousness of an individual. Everybody is different. And I always had a very observant consciousness. Instead of jumping into speaking or jumping into making a judgment, I would always sit back with a good level of discernment, even as a young person, and say, well, you know why. Why is this, or why is that other person or this table of kids picking on me? And I would start to kind of analyze them and. But in a loving way, like, you know, I do know that Becky's parents, you know, aren't very nice to her. And I do know Jonathan, he lost his dad last year, whatever it is.

Barbara McBean [00:30:46]:

And so I always had this way of kind of deconstructing what was around me. I think it also makes me a good teacher. What I try to teach within our organizations is discernment. We all have this ego reaction, that knee-jerk reaction that this person's pissing me off or this person, you know, their motivation is to hurt me or whatever it is. But that's the ego's reaction. And when we really start to realize that the world doesn't revolve around us, there is lots going on for everybody else, you know, aside from ourselves, that not everything that is projected at you has anything to do with you.

Barbara McBean [00:31:39]:

When you can understand that, you can cultivate real inner peace. When we were talking about beauty earlier in your question, I would also say that peacefulness and beauty are very closely linked.

Christopher [00:31:54]:

I also wanted to dismantle another false. I think history has been very cruel to women in that it has pitted them to say that you cannot have beauty and brains. You have to have one or the other. If you are beautiful, we are going to subtract anything of value beyond that. And I think you are the epitome that both exists in everyone. Beauty, brain, philosophy, and love, it's all there. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. We cannot tell you enough how much we appreciate what you've said here today.

Barbara McBean [00:32:38]:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an amazing experience sometimes just to just talk about these things. Right, because how often do you have deep, meaningful conversations that hopefully will touch other people?

Christopher [00:32:54]:

Yes. And we appreciate that you give us the time to explore that with us.

Barbara McBean [00:32:59]:

Yes.

Heather [00:32:59]:

This particular lens to our beauty series has really just taken it up to the next level. So thank you for your time.

Christopher [00:33:07]:

And you have been listening to the.

Heather [00:33:09]:

The Virgin, The Beauty, and The Bitch.

Christopher [00:33:11]:

Find us. Like us. Share us. The series continues, so come on back and join us. We would love to hear from you. To become a partner in the VBB community, we invite you to Find Us@virginbeautybitch.com, Like Us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and Share Us with people who are Defiantly Different, like you. Until next time, thanks for listening.