By Audrey Kim and Penelope King
Old Beauty Standards
Whether it is browsing through Instagram, watching a trendy Netflix show, reading magazines or looking at billboards from the freeway, teenagers are constantly bombarded with society’s version of beauty.
“You see all this stuff about losing weight or how to get a v-line or how to get a flatter stomach,” said sophomore Sabine Cismoski. “You see a lot of advertisement like that which suggests, ‘You want to do this to look better.’”
Often, the exposure to media and society creates a certain prototype for beauty, casting some features as more desirable than others.
“People [post] videos about how to maintain good skin, exercises they do to maintain a skinny body,” said freshman Rachel Lee. “It kind of shows that it’s more preferable to have that kind of body shape or that skin color.”
According to a meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, girls body image were significantly more negative after viewing images of thin women than after viewing images of inanimate objects or of average-sized and plus-sized women.
“I do start thinking about things like, ‘Oh, maybe I’m a bit too fat, maybe a little chubby,’” Lee said. “Sometimes, ‘My eyes are a bit too small’ or ‘How do I maintain nice skin without pimples?’”
As a result, many teens try to conform to these standards as social media tells them what parts of them are not ideal. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, in 2016 around 200,000 teenagers from the ages of 13 to 19 underwent some type of cosmetic procedure to try to change their appearance.
“We’re not [taught to love our bodies],” said freshman Catherine Lei. “Unless you fit [one’s] exact ideal body type, you’re not really taught… [to] love yourself … I don’t think a lot of people love themselves because of how society treats [others] as the ideal standard of beauty.”
Changing the definition of beautiful
However, the standards of beauty upheld by the public and in the media seem to be changing recently to better promote individuality, inclusivity, diversity and self love.
Spearheading the movement are clothing brands who are reforming their advertising and modeling policies.
In 2014, Aerie, a lingerie and intimate apparel brand owned by American Eagle, stopped photoshopping their lingerie campaign models and started hiring regular people to model their products instead of models. In 2015, Aerie’s customer base rose 13 percent.
“Aerie is praised for their ads which I think aren’t retouched or photoshopped,” Lei said. “They have a good reputation for being really inclusive in their products and ads.”
Many other businesses in the fashion industry have pushed for more diverse representation, and their efforts were met with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
When Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty makeup line launched in 2017, it was immediately championed for its inclusivity of skin tone in the wide range of foundation shades.
Additionally, both the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 New York Fashion Week broke records for appearances of plus-size models. Society has noticed the recent changes, and Cismoski believes that America’s beauty industry is beginning to evolve.
“I feel like currently, America is trying to broaden the range and trying to include different cultures, ethnicities, body types and everything when it comes to clothing and beauty and modeling,” she said. “It’s really good because we really do need that for sure.”
Aside from physical appearance, there is an increase in emphasis on self love as well.
“There’s always going to be that aspect of self consciousness, but I feel like we as a society have been trying to promote [self love] more,” Cismoski said. “Especially women now are speaking out about how they … love themselves as they are.”
Cismoski sees it as looking beyond the surface level of physical beauty.
“It’s not just looks, it’s really personality. I find someone more beautiful if they’re funny or they’re sweet and intelligent,” she said. “And of course there are people that are beautiful appearance-wise. It’s mainly just personality and what’s on the inside.”
Beauty around the world
In other parts of the world, the perception of beauty also reflects the culture and society there.
Lee lived in South Korea in second grade and is frequently exposed to Korean social media and its beauty industry. She observes similar beauty trends in Korea to those in America.
“I see a lot of beauty trends like white skin and plastic surgery, such as getting double eyelids, and also maintaining a slender body, sometimes a bit too skinny to a point where it makes you unhealthy,” Lee said.
Pale skin is particularly important to some Koreans, and is a trend that has not wavered for many centuries.
“Before [Korea] modernized, people had to work in the field and there was a separation between the people who worked and the people who didn’t work, or the nobles,” Lee said. “They would judge you on your tan skin, and they would know that you worked a lot and people who had white skin, who didn’t work, they knew, were nobles. I think people still take that into account and think that tan skin is very undesirable and peasant-like.”
Fair skin tone is a consideration for beauty in India as well, even though it is yet another example of unrepresentative beauty standards.
“In India, most of the beauty people are typically really fair skinned,” said freshman Roshni Sahu. “So it’s more biased to people with fair skin, even though most of the population isn’t as so.”
However, growing up, Sahu’s family taught her love her skin despite the standards of beauty.
“I remember one day, I was really young and I was like, ‘Oh, my skin is getting darker and darker,’” Sahu said. “My mom was like, ‘It’s OK’ because … back in the old days, there was a god who had really dark skin, so they said that if you had dark skin you had an attribute of him. [People] tried to lift up people with such things.”
While the idea of beauty in the United States seems to be evolving, Lee stresses that beauty norms in Korea are becoming more and more important. According to the New Yorker, South Korea has the highest plastic surgery per capita in the world, while America is sixth in this ranking. Lee explains that being considered beautiful in Korea is not just for self-satisfaction, but also because one’s looks affect their life in general.
“Koreans are very, very attached to the idea of maintaining beauty and how they look,” Lee said. “Having nice visuals also affects whether you get a job or whether you get married, so looks are very important … So I do feel a bit pressured to be more pretty, have a good fashion sense, or do makeup.”
What Happens Next?
Despite the movement in America and some other parts of the beauty world to become more diverse, there’s still a lot of improvement needed in inclusivity and individuality before the norm for beauty can change.
“There’s still the perfect beauty idea that’s still stuck in the back of everyone’s minds of the perfect skinny girl,” Cismoski said.
The increase in plus-size model castings has been impactful, but according to Glamour magazine, 99 percent of runways are still made up straight-sized models. Additionally, minority races and transgender models are vastly underrepresented.
“[The beauty industry is] trying to include more [racial diversity], but the majority [of models], at least I see this, are still Caucasian,” Lei said, “Society has become a little more accepting and I think it’s just because how we’ve grown from all the discrimination against people of color and people of different sizes that’s not deemed ideal.”
According to Refinery29, a media company focused on young women, barely a fourth of all the models across the four major fashion weeks in Spring 2018 were nonwhite. Transgender models are also the least represented demographics on magazine covers, totaling to only .7 percent.
Some clothing vendors also still cater to a narrow range of body types. Cismoski has had difficulty shopping at some of these places before.
“I do think America is trying to change and that’s good,” she said. “We’re trying to teach younger generations to get this old idea out. I think some companies can still do better. For example, Brandy [Melville]. Their one-size-fits-all is so annoying because one size doesn’t fit all honestly … all of their models are a similar body type, which I don’t think is good for teaching teenage girls what they should look like since Brandy is really popular.”
Beauty standards have made a slow but steady change in recent years. The new diversity of body shapes and skin color is refreshing to see on the runway, but there is a still a long way to go before the industry truly embraces a new and inclusive standard for beauty.
