SI Swimsuit Model Jasmine Sanders Defines Beauty From Within

The six-time brand model shares her philosophy on the matter and leaves us feeling inspired.

Jasmine Sanders was photographed by Yu Tsai in Hollywood, Fla. / Yu Tsai/Sports Illustrated

If you ask model Jasmine Sanders what beauty means to her, she’ll give you a clear-cut answer. “Beauty, to me, means someone [who’s] extremely confident,” she says in a sit-down interview with SI Swimsuit. It was the first thing that came to the six-time brand model’s mind—and a meaningful one at that.

With the talk of beauty standards and the beauty industry, the word has taken on a physical connotation. Beauty, many people might tell you, is all about your physical appearance—what you look like, how you dress or how you do your makeup. In many cases, that’s what the world makes you think. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter, if you ask Sanders.

In the interview, she made that very clear: beauty is not about the “physical” at all. It’s about extreme confidence, of course. But it’s about more than that, too. Beauty, according to Sanders, is at the hands of your personality. She sees it in “someone who can make you laugh and smile and feel your most happy and most beautiful,” the 2020 SI Swimsuit Issue cover model says. “If you can do that for someone else, that is, that’s beauty—that’s being gorgeous. That’s someone really shining from within.” In other words, if you can draw out the beauty in others merely by being yourself, then you are, in fact, beautiful, too.

At the end of the day, the physical doesn’t matter. And it especially doesn’t matter in the case that someone can’t back up physical beauty with a kind, thoughtful personality. “It does not matter how pretty you are,” Sanders remarks, “if you have a [bad] personality, we will see it.”

So, the physical shouldn’t be your focus, no matter how often or how loudly the outside world proclaims that it should. If you want to be beautiful, according to Sanders, it comes down to just a few things. “Always try to be nice, always try to have fun and be light about things,” she advises.

As someone who is beautiful both inside and out, the 33-year-old is a meaningful spokesperson for the question of what beauty means. Sanders is far from simply focused on the physical—and you shouldn’t be, either. After all, the SI Swimsuit legend’s message couldn’t be more true: your personality far outweighs the external. Without kindness, beauty is really hard to come by.