Scars To Your Beautiful

Album

Voice Of Scott McKenzie

Label

Def Jam Recordings

Genre

Synthpop

Composer(s)

Alessia Caracciolo;Warren Felder;Coleridge Tillman;Andrew Wansel;Justin Franks

Entered Chart

Sep 17, 2016

Peak Date

Feb 25, 2017

Released

July 26, 2016

Recorded

2015

Catalog #

EP

Alessia Cara debuted this empowering self-love anthem during her performance on September 28, 2015 at the Life Is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. Cara said to her fans before premiering the song. "The standards that we have to kind of face as young women in everyday life just to feel, or look a certain way, or act a certain way, because there's a lot of pressure being a young girl, and just girls and women in general," she said. "So I wanted to make a reminder to just love yourself and appreciate yourself no matter what." The visual shows various corners of society testifying to how they learned to recognize their individual beauty. "I wanted to do this kind of video for a very long time. Since we had this song - and since we knew it was going to be a single - I had this vision of many different cinematic shots of different kinds of people," Cara explained to Cosmopolitan. "I wanted all kinds of people - young, old, whatever their situation, whether it's visible scars - just a bunch of different women, and there are some men in there as well because it can reach out to guys too." The song was inspired by a traumatic experience in Cara's early teenage years when she started losing her hair in chunks in the shower. The Canadian recalled in an essay for Glamour magazine: "It was one of the scariest things. It got to the point where it was visibly gone. I struggled with that a lot, especially going into high school. You have so many pressures - what people are going to think of you - and I was going into it losing all my hair. I had, like, nothing left. It was patches of missing hair that people would point out, because people are mean in high school." Cara had to learn to accept her hair after her upsetting experience. She wrote: "I want 'Scars to Your Beautiful' to reach different types of women. The girl I am talking about, it's me, it's you - it's every girl who has struggled with feeling not good enough. I want to talk about all the different extremes that girls go through to feel beautiful." Alessia Cara performed the song on the February 4, 2017 episode of Saturday Night Live along with the piano-driven ballad "River of Tears." This reached #1 on the Adult Contemporary airplay chart. According to Billboard magazine, it was the first ever song by an artist whose initials are AC to lead the AC chart, since the survey's debut in July 1961. When Cara performed this song at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, she started with a glamorous look that was gradually stripped down to her natural look with no makeup. She won the award for Best Dance Video at the ceremony for her collaboration with Zedd, "Stay."

She just wants to be beautiful
She goes unnoticed, she knows no limits
She craves attention, she praises an image
She prays to be sculpted by the sculptor
Oh, she don't see the light that's shining
Deeper than the eyes can find it
Maybe we have made her blind
So she tries to cover up her pain and cut her woes away
'Cause covergirls don't cry after their face is made

But there's a hope that's waiting for you in the dark
You should know you're beautiful just the way you are
And you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart
No scars to your beautiful, we're stars and we're beautiful
Oh-oh, oh
Oh-oh, oh, oh
And you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart
No scars to your beautiful, we're stars and we're beautiful

She has dreams to be an envy, so she's starving
You know, covergirls eat nothing
She says "Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything"
"What's a little bit of hunger?"
"I can go a little while longer," she fades away
She don't see her perfect, she don't understand she's worth it
Or that beauty goes deeper than the surface, oh, oh
So to all the girls that's hurting
Let me be your mirror, help you see a little bit clearer
The light that shines within

There's a hope that's waiting for you in the dark
You should know you're beautiful just the way you are
And you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart
No scars to your beautiful, we're stars and we're beautiful
Oh-oh, oh
Oh-oh, oh, oh
And you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart
No scars to your beautiful, we're stars and we're beautiful

No better you than the you that you are (no better you than the you that you are)
No better life than the life we're living (no better life than the life we're living)
No better time for your shine, you're a star (no better time for your shine, you're a star)
Oh, you're beautiful, oh, you're beautiful

There's a hope that's waiting for you in the dark
You should know you're beautiful just the way you are
And you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart
No scars to your beautiful, we're stars and we're beautiful
Oh-oh, oh
Oh-oh, oh, oh
And you don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart
No scars to your beautiful, we're stars and we're beautiful