The immense amount of time and money that the average women spends on maintaining or improving her physical appearance has been given many justifications, but "I just like to look my best" is very close to "I just like to look beautiful". It can be reasonably claimed that societies continuing lust for physical beauty is more appropriate to the Stone Age than to the modern Internet Age - the qualities that men find alluring in a woman may be powerful emblems of her health, fertility and resistance to disease, but they say nothing about her moral worth. The valuing of physical beauty may cause emotional pain and considerable injustice, but this does not prevent its continued worship - as a brief perusal of any magazine stand will prove.
The increasing number of lawsuits involving claimed discrimination on the basis of looks have made little impact to our attitude, nor have the best efforts of some feminist pressure groups to stop the supposed exploitation of women's body's (e.g. beauty contests) - indeed it can be argued that advances in cosmetics, plastic surgery and a constant media bombardment have increased the pressure on women to be "beautiful".
