Is Beauty Skin Deep?

Michelle asked, "What do you think about the saying Beauty is skin deep and do you believe it?" I absolutely do not believe it.

When we say that "beauty is skin deep," we are usually referring to someone's outward appearance, and silently judging them. Implicit in the claim that beauty is skin deep is a critique: "this person spends all their time looking good, so they must be stupid, or shallow, or lack *insert character trait that I clearly possess*." It is a defense mechanism, and it confuses what beauty truly means.

True beauty is about more than outward appearances. If it were not, we could not say that a novel, a poem, a figure of speech, a song, is beautiful. We clearly say that all of these can be beautiful, and thus beauty must mean more than simply outward appearances. In my humble estimation, true beauty, at least in terms of the evaluation of other humans, comes not from their outward appearance, but their inward experience. Beauty is not in the clothes that we wear, but in the things that we do, the way we feel, the way we act, the way we treat others. THAT is true beauty. It comes from those traits, as mentioned in my previous post, that speak to us in some way, and fill us with the joy and pleasure that we get from no other experience.

To end with a question: Is this a legitimate view on the nature of (human) beauty, or is it an overly-romanticized view on the subject that disconnects from reality?