definition essay on beauty standards

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The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central to eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts. However, there was revived interest in beauty and critique of the concept by the 1980s, particularly within feminist philosophy.

This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions.

1. Objectivity and Subjectivity

2.1 the classical conception, 2.2 the idealist conception, 2.3 love and longing, 2.4 hedonist conceptions, 2.5 use and uselessness, 3.1 aristocracy and capital, 3.2 the feminist critique, 3.3 colonialism and race, 3.4 beauty and resistance, other internet resources, related entries.

Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘in the eye of the beholder’—or rather an objective feature of beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible, for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have been made to split the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part located beauty outside of anyone’s particular experiences. Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from the time of the sophists. By the eighteenth century, Hume could write as follows, expressing one ‘species of philosophy’:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757, 136)

And Kant launches his discussion of the matter in The Critique of Judgment (the Third Critique) at least as emphatically:

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective . Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be objective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empirical representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

However, if beauty is entirely subjective—that is, if anything that anyone holds to be or experiences as beautiful is beautiful (as James Kirwan, for example, asserts)—then it seems that the word has no meaning, or that we are not communicating anything when we call something beautiful except perhaps an approving personal attitude. In addition, though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments, it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent: it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful. And it is possible actually to disagree and argue about whether something is beautiful, or to try to show someone that something is beautiful, or learn from someone else why it is.

On the other hand, it seems senseless to say that beauty has no connection to subjective response or that it is entirely objective. That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with no perceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could be detected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty would seem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argue about whether something is beautiful, the idea that one’s experiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate or false might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regard other people’s taste, even when it differs from our own, as provisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, in cases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accounts of beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response, even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of the beholder.

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. In De Veritate Religione , Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). Plato’s account in the Symposium and Plotinus’s in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form. Indeed, Plotinus’s account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I, 6])

In this account, beauty is at least as objective as any other concept, or indeed takes on a certain ontological priority as more real than particular Forms: it is a sort of Form of Forms.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on what beauty is, they both regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. The classical conception ( see below ) treats beauty as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for example the ‘golden section.’ The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE), was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions. Nevertheless, it is conventional in ancient treatments of the topic also to pay tribute to the pleasures of beauty, often described in quite ecstatic terms, as in Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus 23, [ Ennead I, 3]).

At latest by the eighteenth century, however, and particularly in the British Isles, beauty was associated with pleasure in a somewhat different way: pleasure was held to be not the effect but the origin of beauty. This was influenced, for example, by Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke and the other empiricists treated color (which is certainly one source or locus of beauty), for example, as a ‘phantasm’ of the mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response, located in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside the mind. Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors. One argument for this was the variation in color experiences between people. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person with jaundice much of the world allegedly takes on a yellow cast. In addition, the same object is perceived as having different colors by the same the person under different conditions: at noon and midnight, for example. Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty as well.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, that controversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, such as works of art and literature, and that in such controversies, reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing. They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individual experiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizable as a value at all across persons or societies.

Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and Kant’s Critique Of Judgment attempt to find ways through what has been termed ‘the antinomy of taste.’ Taste is proverbially subjective: de gustibus non est disputandum (about taste there is no disputing). On the other hand, we do frequently dispute about matters of taste, and some persons are held up as exemplars of good taste or of tastelessness. Some people’s tastes appear vulgar or ostentatious, for example. Some people’s taste is too exquisitely refined, while that of others is crude, naive, or non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to be both subjective and objective: that is the antinomy.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that taste or the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentally subjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that the Canon was held to be, that if people did not experience certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledge that reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better than others. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neither precisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as we might put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and cultural aspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim to validity.

Hume’s account focuses on the history and condition of the observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste. Our practices with regard to assessing people’s taste entail that judgments of taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, or superficiality are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-ranging acquaintance with various objects of judgment and are unaffected by arbitrary prejudices. Hume moves from considering what makes a thing beautiful to what makes a critic credible. “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard of Taste” 1757, 144).

Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess those qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run, which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the works of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdicts of the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objective standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective, and though certain contemporary works or objects may appear irremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are in a good position to judge functions analogously to an objective standard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could be identified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments about beauty.

Kant similarly concedes that taste is fundamentally subjective, that every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that such judgments vary from person to person.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition of which we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, by means of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that is absolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in the representation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no grounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics can reason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. They cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived] from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of the subject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790, section 34)

But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merely than that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasons entirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experience before a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architecture of a house might remind me of where I grew up. “No one cares about that,” says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me such experiences, but they make no claim to guide or correspond to the experiences of others.

By contrast, the judgment that something is beautiful, Kant argues, is a disinterested judgment. It does not respond to my idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that it does, I will no longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per se of the thing in question. Somewhat as in Hume—whose treatment Kant evidently had in mind—one must be unprejudiced to come to a genuine judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborate interpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normal range of human desires—economic and sexual desires, for instance, which are examples of our ‘interests’ in this sense. If one is walking through a museum and admiring the paintings because they would be extremely expensive were they to come up for auction, for example, or wondering whether one could steal and fence them, one is not having an experience of the beauty of the paintings at all. One must focus on the form of the mental representation of the object for its own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as the thought that insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty of something, one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure, rather, in its sheer representation in one’s experience:

Now, when the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether anything depends or can depend on the existence of the thing, either for myself or anyone else, but how we judge it by mere observation (intuition or reflection). … We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful , and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgement of taste. (Kant 1790, section 2)

One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s dialogue The Moralists , where the argument is framed in terms of a natural landscape: if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are distracted from the form as represented in your experience. And Shaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity of the mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)

For Kant, some beauties are dependent—relative to the sort of thing the object is—and others are free or absolute. A beautiful ox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example, may be beautiful without a reference group or “concept,” and flowers please whether or not we connect them to their practical purposes or functions in plant reproduction (Kant 1790, section 16). The idea in particular that free beauty is completely separated from practical use and that the experiencer of it is not concerned with the actual existence of the object leads Kant to conclude that absolute or free beauty is found in the form or design of the object, or as Clive Bell (1914) put it, in the arrangement of lines and colors (in the case of painting). By the time Bell writes in the early twentieth century, however, beauty is out of fashion in the arts, and Bell frames his view not in terms of beauty but in terms of a general formalist conception of aesthetic value.

Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste one is aware that one is not responding to anything idiosyncratic in oneself, Kant asserts (1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion that anyone similarly situated should have the same experience: that is, one will presume that there ought to be nothing to distinguish one person’s judgment from another’s (though in fact there may be). Built conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertion that anyone similarly situated ought to have the same experience and reach the same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a ‘universalization’ somewhat analogous to the universalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. In ethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if the judgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyone ought to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case of aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but necessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone should reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are different than our own defective.

The influence of this series of thoughts on philosophical aesthetics has been immense. One might mention related approaches taken by such figures as Schopenhauer (1818), Hanslick (1891), Bullough (1912), and Croce (1928), for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantly subjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as ‘objectified pleasure.’ The judgment of something that it is beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort of pleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though the object itself were having subjective states.

We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896, 50–51)

It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky object or device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribed an agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for its causing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience of beauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, this account appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributes subjective states (indeed, one’s own) to a thing which in many instances is not capable of having subjective states.

It is worth saying that Santayana’s treatment of the topic in The Sense of Beauty (1896) was the last major account offered in English for some time, possibly because, once beauty has been admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest on a sort of mistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck from Hume’s and Kant’s treatments was the subjectivity, not the heroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective pleasure, it would seem to have no higher status than anything that entertains, amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as being comparable in importance to truth or justice, for example. And the twentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of the arts, again in part because its trivialization in theory led artists to believe that they ought to pursue more urgent and more serious projects. More significantly, as we will see below, the political and economic associations of beauty with power tended to discredit the whole concept for much of the twentieth century. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty (2003).

However, there was a revival of interest in beauty in something like the classical philosophical sense in both art and philosophy beginning in the 1990s, to some extent centered on the work of art critic Dave Hickey, who declared that “the issue of the 90s will be beauty” (see Hickey 1993), as well as feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of the concept (see Brand 2000, Irigaray 1993). Several theorists made new attempts to address the antinomy of taste. To some extent, such approaches echo G.E. Moore’s: “To say that a thing is beautiful is to say, not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element in something which is: to prove that a thing is truly beautiful is to prove that a whole, to which it bears a particular relation as a part, is truly good” (Moore 1903, 201). One interpretation of this would be that what is fundamentally valuable is the situation in which the object and the person experiencing are both embedded; the value of beauty might include both features of the beautiful object and the pleasures of the experiencer.

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, in Only a Promise of Happiness (2007), characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a way that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. The beautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it also requires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded as an instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, like Hume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have an irreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, or something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.

Aesthetic judgment, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its members, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, without thinking of all others as heresies. … What is involved is less a matter of understanding and more a matter of hope, of establishing a community that centers around it—a community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting and whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)

2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Each of the views sketched below has many expressions, some of which may be incompatible with one another. In many or perhaps most of the actual formulations, elements of more than one such account are present. For example, Kant’s treatment of beauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious elements of hedonism, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes not only the unity of the object, but also the fact that beauty calls out love or adoration. However, it is also worth remarking how divergent or even incompatible with one another many of these views are: for example, some philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use, others precisely with uselessness.

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance painting and architecture:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every form developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated: nothing but independently living parts…. In the system of a classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a very different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932, 9–10, 15)

The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Western conception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear. Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must … present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Aristotle, volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the Metaphysics : “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Aristotle, volume 2, 1705 [1078a36]). This view, as Aristotle implies, is sometimes boiled down to a mathematical formula, such as the golden section, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. The conception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid’s Elements and such works of architecture as the Parthenon, and, again, by the Canon of the sculptor Polykleitos (late fifth/early fourth century BCE).

The Canon was not only a statue deigned to display perfect proportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galen characterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of “the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything…. For having taught us in that treatise all the symmetriae of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work, having made the statue of a man according to his treatise, and having called the statue itself, like the treatise, the Canon ” (quoted in Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to note that the concept of ‘symmetry’ in classical texts is distinct from and richer than its current use to indicate bilateral mirroring. It also refers precisely to the sorts of harmonious and measurable proportions among the parts characteristic of objects that are beautiful in the classical sense, which carried also a moral weight. For example, in the Sophist (228c-e), Plato describes virtuous souls as symmetrical.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius epitomizes the classical conception in central, and extremely influential, formulations, both in its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlying unity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called taxis , and arrangement, which the Greeks name diathesis , and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor and Distribution which in the Greeks is called oeconomia . Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result. Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display of details in their context. This is attained when the details of the work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitable to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetrical correspondence. Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out of the details of the work itself: the correspondence of each given detail to the form of the design as a whole. As in the human body, from cubit, foot, palm, inch and other small parts come the symmetric quality of eurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26–27)

Aquinas, in a typically Aristotelian pluralist formulation, says that “There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or perfection—for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that are brightly coloured are called beautiful” ( Summa Theologica I, 39, 8).

Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century gives what may well be the clearest expression of the view: “What we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1725, 29). Indeed, proponents of the view often speak “in the Mathematical Style.” Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematical formulae, and specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the most beautiful objects (in another echo of Aristotle), though he also rapturously praises nature, with its massive complexity underlain by universal physical laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There is beauty, he says, “In the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton’s Scheme” (Hutcheson 1725, 38).

A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to the idea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions between parts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime :

Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together? … There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved, that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn, that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is beautiful. … For my part, I have at several times very carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only very different from one another, but where one has been very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke 1757, 84–89)

There are many ways to interpret Plato’s relation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched in the Republic characterizes justice in terms of the relation of part and whole. But Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classical culture, and the account of beauty that is expressed specifically in the Symposium —perhaps the key Socratic text for neo-Platonism and for the idealist conception of beauty—expresses an aspiration toward beauty as perfect unity.

In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts the teachings of his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. She connects the experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire to reproduce (Plato, 558–59 [ Symposium 206c–207e]). But the desire to reproduce is associated in turn with a desire for the immortal or eternal: “And why all this longing for propagation? Because this is the one deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since we have agreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own forever, it follows that we are bound to long for immortality as well as for the good—which is to say that Love is a longing for immortality” (Plato, 559, [ Symposium 206e–207a]). What follows is, if not classical, at any rate classic:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance. Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers how every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment. … And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward sight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation. … Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is. And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man’s life is ever worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. (Plato, 561–63 [ Symposium 210a–211d])

Beauty here is conceived—perhaps explicitly in contrast to the classical aesthetics of integral parts and coherent whole—as perfect unity, or indeed as the principle of unity itself.

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty with formedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things, and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what we have called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. But think what this means. Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout. All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. (Plotinus, 21 [ Ennead I,6])

Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physical thing, “making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied. … Hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea” (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I,3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must be immolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experience lead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of God that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aesthetic asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion that finally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation as yearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of God as beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29). Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of the immense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Eco quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing a richly-appointed church:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Eco 1959, 14)

This conception has had many expressions in the modern era, including in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, and Hegel, according to whom the aesthetic or the experience of art and beauty is a primary bridge (or to use the Platonic image, stairway or ladder) between the material and the spiritual. For Shaftesbury, there are three levels of beauty: what God makes (nature); what human beings make from nature or what is transformed by human intelligence (art, for example); and finally, the intelligence that makes even these artists (that is, God). Shaftesbury’s character Theocles describes “the third order of beauty,”

which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. … Whatever appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty. … Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order. (Shaftesbury 1738, 228–29)

Schiller’s expression of a similar series of thoughts was fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beauty developed within German Idealism:

The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, can be drawn from no actual case—rather does itself correct and guide our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore be sought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simply from the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational; in a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of humanity. Beauty … makes of man a whole, complete in himself. (1795, 59–60, 86)

For Schiller, beauty or play or art (he uses the words, rather cavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process of integrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, or the sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration are we—who exist simultaneously on both these levels—free. This is quite similar to Plato’s ‘ladder’: beauty as a way to ascend to the abstract or spiritual. But Schiller—though this is at times unclear—is more concerned with integrating the realms of nature and spirit than with transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a la Plato. It is beauty and art that performs this integration.

In this and in other ways—including in the tripartite dialectical structure of his account—Schiller strikingly anticipates Hegel, who writes as follows.

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and the empirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with real particularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

Beauty, we might say, or artistic beauty at any rate, is a route from the sensuous and particular to the Absolute and to freedom, from finitude to the infinite, formulations that—while they are influenced by Schiller—strikingly recall Shaftesbury, Plotinus, and Plato.

Hegel, who associates beauty and art with mind and spirit, holds with Shaftesbury that the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it, “the beauty of art is born of the spirit and born again ” (Hegel 1835, 2). That is, the natural world is born of God, but the beauty of art transforms that material again by the spirit of the artist. This idea reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who very nearly denies that nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate asserts that the beauty of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art. “The real meaning of ‘natural beauty’ is that certain persons, things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one, comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts” (Croce 1928, 230).

Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, “by beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (Burke 1757, 83). As we have seen, in almost all treatments of beauty, even the most apparently object or objectively-oriented, there is a moment in which the subjective qualities of the experience of beauty are emphasized: rhapsodically, perhaps, or in terms of pleasure or ataraxia , as in Schopenhauer. For example, we have already seen Plotinus, for whom beauty is certainly not subjective, describe the experience of beauty ecstatically. In the idealist tradition, the human soul, as it were, recognizes in beauty its true origin and destiny. Among the Greeks, the connection of beauty with love is proverbial from early myth, and Aphrodite the goddess of love won the Judgment of Paris by promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world.

There is an historical connection between idealist accounts of beauty and those that connect it to love and longing, though there would seem to be no entailment either way. We have Sappho’s famous fragment 16: “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful sights the dark world offers, but I say it’s whatever you love best” (Sappho, 16). (Indeed, at Phaedrus 236c, Socrates appears to defer to “the fair Sappho” as having had greater insight than himself on love [Plato, 483].)

Plato’s discussions of beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus occur in the context of the theme of erotic love. In the former, love is portrayed as the ‘child’ of poverty and plenty. “Nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless” (Plato, 556 [Symposium 203b–d]). Love is portrayed as a lack or absence that seeks its own fulfillment in beauty: a picture of mortality as an infinite longing. Love is always in a state of lack and hence of desire: the desire to possess the beautiful. Then if this state of infinite longing could be trained on the truth, we would have a path to wisdom. The basic idea has been recovered many times, for example by the Romantics. It fueled the cult of idealized or courtly love through the Middle Ages, in which the beloved became a symbol of the infinite.

Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived this idea, and turning away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing (which are not necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as the experiential correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas use Sappho’s fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as “the object of longing” and characterizes longing as intense and unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition of a finite being in time, where we are always in the process of losing whatever we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. And Nehamas writes that “I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an art that speaks to our desire. … Beautiful things don’t stand aloof, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and possess, and they quicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and direction” (Nehamas 2007, 77).

Thinkers of the 18 th century—many of them oriented toward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite a typical formulation, says that “By beautiful we generally understand whatever, when seen, heard, or understood, delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within us agreeable sensations” (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is not clear whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms of classical formal elements or in terms of the viewer’s pleasurable response. He begins the Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears to assert that objects which instantiate his ‘compound ratio of uniformity and variety’ are peculiarly or necessarily capable of producing pleasure:

The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider, is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there are vastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, which obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every one acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture, than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong and lively as possible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising among settled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, a fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify’d by Woods, Hills, Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are not quite simple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is incomparably greater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or swelling soever. (Hutcheson 1725, 22)

When Hutcheson then goes on to describe ‘original or absolute beauty,’ he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualities of the beautiful thing (a “compound ratio” of uniformity and variety), and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centered in the human experience of pleasure. But of course the idea of pleasure could come apart from Hutcheson’s particular aesthetic preferences, which are poised precisely opposite Plotinus’s, for example. That we find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical building (if we do) is contingent. But that beauty is connected to pleasure appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary, and the pleasure which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas rather than things as its objects.

Hume writes in a similar vein in the Treatise of Human Nature :

Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. … Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume 1740, 299)

Though this appears ambiguous as between locating the beauty in the pleasure or in the impression or idea that causes it, Hume is soon talking about the ‘sentiment of beauty,’ where sentiment is, roughly, a pleasurable or painful response to impressions or ideas, though the experience of beauty is a matter of cultivated or delicate pleasures. Indeed, by the time of Kant’s Third Critique and after that for perhaps two centuries, the direct connection of beauty to pleasure is taken as a commonplace, to the point where thinkers are frequently identifying beauty as a certain sort of pleasure. Santayana, for example, as we have seen, while still gesturing in the direction of the object or experience that causes pleasure, emphatically identifies beauty as a certain sort of pleasure.

One result of this approach to beauty—or perhaps an extreme expression of this orientation—is the assertion of the positivists that words such as ‘beauty’ are meaningless or without cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjective approval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matter of sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they were trying to ameliorate the sting, largely by emphasizing critical consensus. But once this fundamental admission is made, any consensus seems contingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears to certain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can be no reasons to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensus assessment. A.J. Ayer writes:

Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations could confirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic with the practical. “ Taste is the faculty of judging an object or mode of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful ” (Kant 1790, 45). Edward Bullough distinguishes the beautiful from the merely agreeable on the grounds that the former requires a distance from practical concerns: “Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” (Bullough 1912, 244).

On the other hand, many philosophers have gone in the opposite direction and have identified beauty with suitedness to use. ‘Beauty’ is perhaps one of the few terms that could plausibly sustain such entirely opposed interpretations.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the ancient hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene took a rather direct approach.

Is not then, also, a beautiful woman useful in proportion as she is beautiful; and a boy and a youth useful in proportion to their beauty? Well then, a handsome boy and a handsome youth must be useful exactly in proportion as they are handsome. Now the use of beauty is, to be embraced. If then a man embraces a woman just as it is useful that he should, he does not do wrong; nor, again, will he be doing wrong in employing beauty for the purposes for which it is useful. (Diogenes Laertius, 94)

In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worst of the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet the idea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number of thinkers. Xenophon’s Memorabilia puts the view in the mouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:

Socrates : In short everything which we use is considered both good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely its use. Aristippus : Why then, is a dung-basket a beautiful thing? Socrates : Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, if the one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill. (Xenophon, Book III, viii)

Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogue Alciphron , though he begins with the hedonist conception: “Every one knows that beauty is what pleases” (Berkeley 1732, 174; see Carritt 1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons of usefulness. Thus, as Xenophon suggests, on this view, things are beautiful only in relation to the uses for which they are intended or to which they are properly applied. The proper proportions of an object depend on what kind of object it is and, again, a beautiful car might make an ugly tractor. “The parts, therefore, in true proportions, must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as they may best conspire to the use and operation of the whole” (Berkeley 1732, 174–75; see Carritt 1931, 76). One result of this is that, though beauty remains tied to pleasure, it is not an immediate sensible experience. It essentially requires intellection and practical activity: one has to know the use of a thing and assess its suitedness to that use.

This treatment of beauty is often used, for example, to criticize the distinction between fine art and craft, and it avoids sheer philistinism by enriching the concept of ‘use,’ so that it might encompass not only performing a practical task, but performing it especially well or with an especial satisfaction. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian and European medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art or craft expresses as well as serves its purpose.

A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, … a hymn than a mathematical equation. … A well-made sword is not less beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their purpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty (2009) returns to a modified Kantianism with regard to both beauty and sublimity, enriched by many and varied examples. “We call something beautiful,” writes Scruton, “when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form ” (Scruton 2009, 26). Despite the Kantian framework, Scruton, like Sartwell and Nehamas, throws the subjective/objective distinction into question. He compares experiencing a beautiful thing to a kiss. To kiss someone that one loves is not merely to place one body part on another, “but to touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is compromising – it is a move from one self toward another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being” (Scruton 2009, 48). This, Scruton says, is a profound pleasure.

3. The Politics of Beauty

Kissing sounds nice, but some kisses are coerced, some pleasures obtained at a cost to other people. The political associations of beauty over the last few centuries have been remarkably various and remarkably problematic, particularly in connection with race and gender, but in other aspects as well. This perhaps helps account for the neglect of the issue in early-to-mid twentieth-century philosophy as well as its growth late in the century as an issue in social justice movements, and subsequently in social-justice oriented philosophy.

The French revolutionaries of 1789 associated beauty with the French aristocracy and with the Rococo style of the French royal family, as in the paintings of Fragonard: hedonist expressions of wealth and decadence, every inch filled with decorative motifs. Beauty itself became subject to a moral and political critique, or even to direct destruction, with political motivations (see Levey 1985). And by the early 20th century, beauty was particularly associated with capitalism (ironically enough, considering the ugliness of the poverty and environmental destruction it often induced). At times even great art appeared to be dedicated mainly to furnishing the homes of rich people, with the effect of concealing the suffering they were inflicting. In response, many anti-capitalists, including many Marxists, appeared to repudiate beauty entirely. And in the aesthetic politics of Nazism, reflected for example in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the association of beauty and right wing politics was sealed to devastating effect (see Spotts 2003).

Early on in his authorship, Karl Marx could hint that the experience of beauty distinguishes human beings from all other animals. An animal “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx 1844, 76). But later Marx appeared to conceive beauty as “superstructure” or “ideology” disguising the material conditions of production. Perhaps, however, he also anticipated the emergence of new beauties, available to all both as makers and appreciators, in socialism.

Capitalism, of course, uses beauty – at times with complete self-consciousness – to manipulate people into buying things. Many Marxists believed that the arts must be turned from providing fripperies to the privileged or advertising that helps make them wealthier to showing the dark realities of capitalism (as in the American Ashcan school, for example), and articulating an inspiring Communist future. Stalinist socialist realism consciously repudiates the aestheticized beauties of post-impressionist and abstract painting, for example. It has urgent social tasks to perform (see Bown and Lanfranconi 2012). But the critique tended at times to generalize to all sorts of beauty: as luxury, as seduction, as disguise and oppression. The artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), having survived the First World War, wrote this about the radical artists of the early century: “To us, Dada was above all a moral reaction. Our rage aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream” (quoted in Danto 2003, 49).

Theodor Adorno, in his book Aesthetic Theory , wrote that one symptom of oppression is that oppressed groups and cultures are regarded as uncouth, dirty, ragged; in short, that poverty is ugly. It is art’s obligation, he wrote, to show this ugliness, imposed on people by an unjust system, clearly and without flinching, rather to distract people by beauty from the brutal realities of capitalism. “Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer to integrate or mitigate it or reconcile it with its own existence,” Adorno wrote. “Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image” (Adorno 1970, 48–9).

The political entanglements of beauty tend to throw into question various of the traditional theories. For example, the purity and transcendence associated with the essence of beauty in the realm of the Forms seems irrelevant, as beauty shows its centrality to politics and commerce, to concrete dimensions of oppression. The austere formalism of the classical conception, for example, seems neither here nor there when the building process is brutally exploitative.

As we have seen, the association of beauty with the erotic is proverbial from Sappho and is emphasized relentlessly by figures such as Burke and Nehamas. But the erotic is not a neutral or universal site, and we need to ask whose sexuality is in play in the history of beauty, with what effects. This history, particularly in the West and as many feminist theorists and historians have emphasized, is associated with the objectification and exploitation of women. Feminists beginning in the 19th century gave fundamental critiques of the use of beauty as a set of norms to control women’s bodies or to constrain their self-presentation and even their self-image in profound and disabling ways (see Wollstonecraft 1792, Grimké 1837).

In patriarchal society, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it, the content of sexuality “is the gaze that constructs women as objects for male pleasure. I draw on pornography for its form and content,” she continues, describing her treatment of the subject, “for the gaze that eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal. That is the content of sexuality that defines gender female in this culture, and visual thingification is its method” (MacKinnon 1987, 53–4). Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reaches one variety of radical critique and conclusion: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey 1975, 60).

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic treatment was focused on the scopophilia (a Freudian term denoting neurotic sexual pleasure configured around looking) of Hollywood films, in which men appeared as protagonists, and women as decorative or sexual objects for the pleasure of the male characters and male audience-members. She locates beauty “at the heart of our oppression.” And she appears to have a hedonist conception of it: beauty engenders pleasure. But some pleasures, like some kisses, are sadistic or exploitative at the individual and at the societal level. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin (1988) and Griselda Pollock (1987) brought such insights to bear on the history of painting, for example, where the scopophilia is all too evident in famous nudes such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus , which a feminist slashed with knife in 1914 because “she didn’t like the way men gawked at it”.

Feminists such as Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth , generalized such insights into a critique of the ways women are represented throughout Western popular culture: in advertising, for example, or music videos. Such practices have the effect of constraining women to certain acceptable ways of presenting themselves publicly, which in turn greatly constrains how seriously they are taken, or how much of themselves they can express in public space. As have many other commentators, Wolf connects the representation of the “beautiful” female body, in Western high art but especially in popular culture, to eating disorders and many other self-destructive behaviors, and indicates that a real overturning of gender hierarchy will require deeply re-construing the concept of beauty.

The demand on women to create a beautiful self-presentation by male standards, Wolf argues, fundamentally compromises women’s action and self-understanding, and makes fully human relationships between men and women difficult or impossible. In this Wolf follows, among others, the French thinker Luce Irigaray, who wrote that “Female beauty is always considered as finery ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of, an appearance of, a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone , rarely to interrogate the state of our body or our spirit, rarely for ourselves and in search of our becoming” (quoted in Robinson 2000, 230).

“Sex is held hostage by beauty,” Wolf remarks, “and its ransom terms are engraved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film” (Wolf 1991f, 157).

Early in the 20th century, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) described European or white standards of beauty as a deep dimension of oppression, quite similarly to the way Naomi Wolf describes beauty standards for women. These standards are relentlessly reinforced in authoritative images, but they are incompatible with black skin, black bodies, and also traditional African ways of understanding human beauty. White standards of beauty, Garvey argued, devalue black bodies. The truly oppressive aspects of such norms can be seen in the way they induce self-alienation, as Wolf argues with regard to sexualized images of women. “Some of us in America, the West Indies, and Africa believe that the nearer we approach the white man in color, the greater our social standing and privilege,” he wrote (Garvey 1925 [1986], 56). He condemns skin bleaching and hair straightening as ways that black people are taught to devalue themselves by white standards of beauty. And he connects such standards to ‘colorism’ or prejudice in the African-American community toward darker-skinned black people.

Such observations suggest some of the strengths of cultural relativism as opposed to subjectivism or universalism: standards of beauty appear in this picture not to be idiosyncratic to individuals, nor to be universal among all people, but to be tied to group identities and to oppression and resistance.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X (1925–1965), whose parents were activists in the Garvey movement, describes ‘conking’ or straightening his hair with lye products as a young man. “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation,” he writes, “when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that black people are ‘inferior’ – and white people ‘superior’ – that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards” (X 1964, 56–7). For both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, a key moment in the transformation of racial oppression would be the affirmation of standards of black beauty that are not parasitic on white standards, and hence not directly involved in racial oppression. This was systematically developed after Malcolm’s death in the “natural” hairstyles and African fabrics in the Black Power movement. Certainly, people have many motivations for straightening or coloring their hair, for example. But the critical examination of the racial content of beauty norms was a key moment in black liberation movements, many of which, around 1970, coalesced around the slogan Black is beautiful . These are critiques of specific standards of beauty; they are also tributes to beauty’s power.

Imposing standards of beauty on non-Western cultures, and, in particular, misappropriating standards of beauty and beautiful objects from them, formed one of the most complex strategies of colonialism. Edward Said famously termed this dynamic “orientalism.” Novelists such as Nerval and Kipling and painters such as Delacroix and Picasso, he argued, used motifs drawn from Asian and African cultures, treating them as “exotic” insertions into Western arts. Such writers and artists might even have understood themselves to be celebrating the cultures they depicted in pictures of Arabian warriors or African masks. But they used this imagery precisely in relation to Western art history. They distorted what they appropriated.

“Being a White Man, in short,” writes Said, “was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible” (Said 1978, 227). This style might be encapsulated in the outfits of colonial governors, and their mansions. But it was also typified by an appropriative “appreciation” of “savage” arts and “exotic” beauties, which were of course not savage or exotic in their own context. Even in cases where the beauty of such objects was celebrated, the appreciation was mixed with condescension and misapprehension, and also associated with stripping colonial possessions of their most beautiful objects (as Europeans understood beauty)—shipping them back to the British Museum, for example. Now some beautiful objects, looted in colonialism, are being returned to their points of origin (see Matthes 2017), but many others remain in dispute.

However, if beauty has been an element in various forms of oppression, it has also been an element in various forms of resistance, as the slogan “Black is beautiful” suggests. The most compelling responses to oppressive standards and uses of beauty have given rise to what might be termed counter-beauties . When fighting discrimination against people with disabilities, for example, one may decry the oppressive norms that regard disabled bodies as ugly and leave it at that. Or one might try to discover what new standards of beauty and subversive pleasures might arise in the attempt to regard disabled bodies as beautiful (Siebers 2005). For that matter, one might uncover the ways that non-normative bodies and subversive pleasures actually do fulfill various traditional criteria of beauty. Indeed, for some decades there has been a disability arts movement, often associated with artists such as Christine Sun Kim and Riva Lehrer, which tries to do just that (see Siebers 2005).

The exploration of beauty, in some ways flipping it over into an instrument of feminist resistance, or showing directly how women’s beauty could be experienced outside of patriarchy, has been a theme of much art by women of the 20th and 21st centuries. Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” place settings undertake to absorb and reverse the objectifying gaze. The exploration of the meaning of the female body in the work of performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Karen Finley, and Orlan, tries both to explore the objectification of the female body and to affirm women’s experience in its concrete realities from the inside: to make of it emphatically a subject rather than an object (see Striff 1997).

“Beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving,” wrote philosopher Peg Zeglin Brand in 2000. “Confident young women today pack their closets with mini-skirts and sensible suits. Young female artists toy with feminine stereotypes in ways that make their feminist elders uncomfortable. They recognize that … beauty can be a double-edged sword – as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing them” (Brand 2000, xv). Indeed, vernacular norms of beauty as expressed in media and advertising have shifted in virtue of the feminist and anti-racist attacks on dominant body norms, as the concept’s long journey continues.

• Adorno, Theodor, 1970 [1997], Aesthetic Theory , Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica , Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.), London: Christian Classics, 1981 [13 th century text].
• Augustine, Earlier Writings , J.H. Burleigh, ed., New York: WJK Publishing, 1953 [4 th /5 th century AD text].
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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion? You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Questionable standards: the past and present of beauty.

Royal Worcester Corset Company (American, 1864–1950). Corset , 1876. Cotton, metal, bone; Length at CF (a): 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of E. A. Meister, 1950 (2009.300.3105a–c)

«Why does beauty always seem unattainable? Throughout history, young women have taken drastic measures to be considered beautiful. While fashion has always been a means for individual expression and society has broadened its definition of beauty, we still see judgment against women who don't fit an ideal. Through investigation and interpretation of 19th-century fashion, we can see the ways women have tried to meet past beauty standards and how those standards have evolved over time.»

By looking at an American dress from the 1850s, shown below, we can see a contemporary beauty standard for women. Judging by the expensive material and embellishments, the dress would have been worn by an upper-class woman. (In fact, the dress was worn by the wife of Former Rhode Island Governor William Warner Hoppin.) The dress is broken up into two parts: bodice and skirt. Under the dress, a contemporary wearer would have worn a corset that laced up in the back and hooked in the front and a hoop skirt, which would give structure to the dress. She also would have added jewels, lace pieces, and other accessories to complete her outfit.

Dress , 1850s. American. Silk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Frederick Street Hoppin, 1963 (C.I.63.7.3a, b)

Hoop skirts helped women attain a fashionable dress shape without sacrificing comfort. They were collapsible, which made for easy closet storage and (albeit limited) sitting, most likely on the top or edge of a chair. The style of the corset remained relatively the same into the 1860s, but hoop-skirt technology changed with the approaching decade. The invention of the crinoline in 1856 allowed women to add volume to their skirts without the added weight of eight to ten starched petticoats.

Royal Worcester Corset Company (American, 1864–1950). Cage crinoline , 1862–63. American. Linen, metal; width: 25 in. (63.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Brooklyn Museum Collection (2009.300.2250)

With thin, steel loops sewn into a single petticoat, crinolines were much cheaper and lighter than previously used fabric and whale bone. As their mass production was perfected, the cost of a crinoline dropped from an estimated five dollars to two dollars and fifty cents, making it possible for both the lady of the house and her maids to stay fashionable.

By the mid-1860s, women were able to achieve a width of six feet in their skirt hems with the help of crinolines. The newfound ability to easily increase skirt size coincided with (and furthered) a changing fashion trend. It proved easier to add volume to the back of the skirt, as there was only so far to go in the front, and sometimes a separate but matching apron-shaped basque would be tied to the back as well.

Left: Franz Xaver Winterhalter's 1854 portrait of the Empress Eugénie shows the changing fashion trend toward a more elliptical, trailing silhouette. We created this GIF to give you a sense of the layers the empress might have been wearing beneath this dress. Image courtesy of the authors

Contemporary press made it seem like crinolines made simple movements like passing through a door, sitting on a couch, and getting in and out of a carriage very difficult, but these hardships were likely exaggerated in order to argue that women showed poor judgement. Amelia Bloomer, a women's rights advocate and proponent of dress reform, stopped wearing reform dress (a shorter skirt with loose trousers) after the hoop was introduced, in part because she found the hoop "light and pleasant to wear." While it is often difficult to separate the real and invented health risks of past fashion trends, it is true that women would do everything in their power to achieve a coveted figure despite the rumors of health risks and illnesses that resulted from altering one's body shape.

Today, the pressure to be a size zero, and then a zero-zero, is felt by teenagers and adults alike, but some modern designers reach outside of the limits of today's beauty standards to showcase a different take on beauty and fashion. Jean Paul Gaultier, an avant-garde fashion designer famous for constructing Madonna's cone bra, is a perfect example of how fashion is used in a more playful manner today. Gaultier believes that feminine beauty comes in many forms, which we can see in his use of curvy models and drag queens on the runway and the way he mocks absurd women's fashion trends in his designs.

Gaultier featured this haute couture dress in a show he called a compilation of his "greatest hits," which showcased clothes that resembled nudity. Jean Paul Gaultier (French, born 1952). Evening ensemble , spring/summer 2001. (A, b) silk, glass, synthetic; (c) silk, synthetic, leather; Length at CB (a): 56 in. (142.2 cm) Length (b, c): 21 in. (53.3 cm) Length (d, e): 9 1/2 in. (24.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Catharine Breyer Van Bomel Foundation Gift, and funds from various donors, 2001 (2001.455.2a–i)

Modern women continue to take drastic measures to achieve a look that meets current beauty standards despite an expanding definition of beauty in the 21st century. Designers like Gaultier are helping to change these standards, but we still have a long way to go. After close examination of the evolution of women's fashion, we don't have a definitive answer to how beauty standards for women started or why they still exist today, but it has been interesting to explore.

Anna B. was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.

Julia G. was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.

Marcus J. was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.

Naja B.was formerly a high school intern with the Museum's High School Internship Program.

Premium Content

• WOMEN OF IMPACT

The idea of beauty is always shifting. Today, it’s more inclusive than ever.

Whom we deem ‘beautiful’ is a reflection of our values. Now, a more expansive world has arrived where ‘we are all beautiful.’

The Sudanese model Alek Wek appeared on the November 1997 cover of the U.S. edition of Elle magazine, in a photograph by French creative director Gilles Bensimon . It was, as is so often the case in the beauty business, a global production.

Wek, with her velvety ebony skin and mere whisper of an Afro, was posed in front of a stark, white screen. Her simple, white Giorgio Armani blazer almost disappeared into the background. Wek, however, was intensely present.

She was standing at an angle but looking directly into the camera with a pleasant smile spread across her face, which wasn’t so much defined by planes and angles as by sweet, broad, distinctly African curves. Wek represented everything that a traditional cover girl was not.

More than 20 years after she was featured on that Elle cover, the definition of beauty has continued to expand, making room for women of color, obese women, women with vitiligo , bald women, women with gray hair and wrinkles. We are moving toward a culture of big-tent beauty. One in which everyone is welcome. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone’s idealized version can be seen in the pages of magazines or on the runways of Paris.

We have become more accepting because people have demanded it, protested for it, and used the bully pulpit of social media to shame beauty’s gatekeepers into opening the doors wider.

Eye of the beholder

Technology has put the power to define beauty in the hands of the people. Mobile phones allow people greater control of their image, and include apps that come with filters used for fun, appearance, and entertainment.

Wek was a new vision of beauty—that virtue forever attached to women . It has long been a measure of their social value; it is also a tool to be used and manipulated. A woman should not let her beauty go to waste; that was something people would say back when a woman’s future depended on her marrying well. Her husband’s ambition and potential should be as dazzling as her fine features.

For Hungry Minds

Beauty is, of course, cultural. What one community admires may leave another group of people cold or even repulsed. What one individual finds irresistible elicits a shrug from another. Beauty is personal. But it’s also universal. There are international beauties—those people who have come to represent the standard.

For generations, beauty required a slender build but with a generous bosom and a narrow waist. The jawline was to be defined, the cheekbones high and sharp. The nose angular. The lips full but not distractingly so. The eyes, ideally blue or green, large and bright. Hair was to be long, thick, and flowing—and preferably golden. Symmetry was desired. Youthfulness, that went without saying.

This was the standard from the earliest days of women’s magazines, when beauty was codified and commercialized. The so-called great beauties and swans—women such as actress Catherine Deneuve , socialite C.Z. Guest , or Princess Grace —came closest to this ideal. The further one diverged from this version of perfection, the more exotic a woman became. Diverge too much and a woman was simply considered less attractive—or desirable or valuable. And for some women—black and brown or fat or old ones—beauty seemed impossible in the broader culture.

In the early part of the 1990s, the definition of beauty as it applied to women began to loosen thanks to the arrival of Kate Moss , with her slight figure and vaguely ragamuffin aesthetic. Standing five feet seven inches, she was short for a runway walker. The British teenager was not particularly graceful, and she lacked the noble bearing that gave many other models their regal air. Moss’s star turn in advertisements for Calvin Klein signified a major departure from the long-legged gazelles of years past.

Moss was disruptive to the beauty system, but she was still well within the industry’s comfort zone of defining beauty as a white, European conceit. So too were the youthquake models of the 1960s such as Twiggy , who had the gangly, curveless physique of a 12-year-old boy. The 1970s brought Lauren Hutton, who stirred scandal simply because she had a gap between her teeth.

Even the early black models who broke barriers were relatively safe: women such as Beverly Johnson, the first African-American model to appear on the cover of American Vogue , the Somali-born Iman, Naomi Campbell, and Tyra Banks. They had keen features and flowing hair—or wigs or weaves to give the illusion that they did. Iman had a luxuriously long neck that made legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland gasp. Campbell was—and is—all va-va-voom legs and hips, and Banks rose to fame as the girl next door in a polka dot bikini on the cover of Sports Illustrated .

Wek was a revelation. Her beauty was something entirely different.

Her tightly coiled hair was sheared close to her scalp. Her seemingly poreless skin was the color of dark chocolate. Her nose was broad; her lips were full. Her legs were impossibly long and incredibly thin. Indeed, her entire body had the stretched-out sinewiness of an African stick figure brought to life.

To eyes that had been trained to understand beauty through the lens of Western culture, Wek was jarring to everyone, and black folks were no exception. Many of them did not consider her beautiful. Even women who might have looked in the mirror and seen the same nearly coal black skin and tightly coiled hair reflected back had trouble reckoning with this Elle cover girl.

See and be seen

Fashion and beauty magazines present a paragon of aspiration, often setting beauty standards for women across cultures. The magazines also serve as giant advertisements for the industries dependent on selling these ideals to willing customers.

Wek was abruptly and urgently transformative. It was as though some great cultural mountain had been scaled by climbing straight up a steep slope, as if there were neither time nor patience for switchbacks. To see Wek celebrated was exhilarating and vertiginous. Everything about her was the opposite of what had come before.

We are in a better place than we were a generation ago, but we have not arrived at utopia. Many of the clubbiest realms of beauty still don’t include larger women, disabled ones, or senior citizens.

But to be honest, I’m not sure exactly what utopia would look like. Is it a world in which everyone gets a tiara and the sash of a beauty queen just for showing up? Or is it one in which the definition of beauty gets stretched so far that it becomes meaningless? Perhaps the way to utopia is by rewriting the definition of the word itself to better reflect how we’ve come to understand it—as something more than an aesthetic pleasure.

We know that beauty has financial value. We want to be around beautiful people because they delight the eye but also because we think they are intrinsically better humans. We’ve been told that attractive people are paid higher salaries. In truth, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s really a combination of beauty, intelligence, charm, and collegiality that serves as a recipe for better pay. Still, beauty is an integral part of the equation.

But on a powerfully emotional level, being perceived as attractive means being welcomed into the cultural conversation. You are part of the audience for advertising and marketing. You are desired. You are seen and accepted. When questions arise about someone’s looks, that’s just another way of asking: How acceptable is she? How relevant is she? Does she matter?

Today suggesting that a person is not gorgeous is to risk social shunning or at least a social media lashing. What kind of monster declares another human being unattractive? To do so is to virtually dismiss that person as worthless. It’s better to lie. Of course you’re beautiful, sweetheart; of course you are.

We have come to equate beauty with humanity. If we don’t see the beauty in another person, we are blind to that person’s humanity. It’s scary how important beauty has become. It goes to the very soulfulness of a person.

Beauty has become so important today that denying that people possess it is akin to denying them oxygen.

There used to be gradations when it came to describing the feminine ideal: homely, jolie laide, attractive, pretty, and ultimately, beautiful. The homely woman managed as best she could. She adjusted to the fact that her looks were not her most distinguishing feature. She was the woman with the terrific personality. Striking women had some characteristic that made them stand out: bountiful lips, an aristocratic nose, a glorious poitrine. A lot of women could be described as attractive. They were at the center of the bell curve. Pretty was another level. Hollywood is filled with pretty people.

Ah, but beautiful! Beautiful was a description that was reserved for special cases, for genetic lottery winners. Beauty could even be a burden because it startled people. It intimidated them. Beauty was exceptional.

But improved plastic surgery, more personalized and effective nutrition, the flowering of the fitness industry, and the rise of selfie filters on smartphones, along with Botox, fillers, and the invention of Spanx, have all combined to help us look better—and get a little bit closer to looking exceptional. Therapists, bloggers, influencers, stylists, and well-meaning friends have raised their voices in a chorus of body-positivity mantras: You go, girl! You slay! Yasss, queen! They are not charged with speaking harsh truths and helping us see ourselves vividly and become better versions of ourselves. Their role is constant uplift, to tell us that we are perfect just as we are.

And the globalization of, well, everything means that somewhere out there is an audience that will appreciate you in all your magnificent … whatever.

We are all beautiful.

In New York, London, Milan, and Paris—the traditional fashion capitals of the world—the beauty codes have changed more dramatically in the past 10 years than in the preceding hundred. Historically, shifts had been by degrees. Changes in aesthetics weren’t linear, and despite fashion’s reputation for rebelliousness, change was slow. Revolutions were measured in a few inches.

Through the years, an angular shape has been celebrated and then a more curvaceous one. The average clothing size of a runway model, representative of the designers’ ideal, shrank from a six to a zero; the pale blondes of Eastern Europe ruled the runway until the sun-kissed blondes from Brazil deposed them. The couture body—lean, hipless, and practically flat-chested—can be seen in the classic portraits by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Gordon Parks, as well as on the runways of designers such as John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen. But then Miuccia Prada, who had led the way in promoting a nearly homogeneous catwalk of pale, white, thin models, suddenly embraced an hourglass shape. And then plus-size model Ashley Graham appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 2016 , and in 2019 Halima Aden became the first model to wear a hijab in that same magazine , and suddenly everyone is talking about modesty and beauty and fuller figures … and the progress is dizzying.

In the past decade, beauty has moved resolutely forward into territory that was once deemed niche. Nonbinary and transgender are part of the mainstream beauty narrative. As the rights of LGBTQ individuals have been codified in the courts, so have the aesthetics particular to them been absorbed into the beauty dialogue. Transgender models walk the runways and appear in advertising campaigns. They are hailed on the red carpet for their glamour and good taste but also for their physical characteristics. Their bodies are celebrated as aspirational.

The catalyst for our changed understanding of beauty has been a perfect storm of technology, economics, and a generation of consumers with sharpened aesthetic literacy.

The technology is social media in general and Instagram specifically. The fundamental economic factor is the unrelenting competition for market share and the need for individual companies to grow their audience of potential customers for products ranging from designer dresses to lipstick. And the demographics lead, as they always do these days, to millennials, with an assist from baby boomers who plan to go into that good night with six-pack abs.

Hyejin Yun undergoes eyelid surgery in the Hyundai Aesthetics clinic in Seoul. The procedure makes eyes look bigger. South Korea has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world; one in three women ages 19 to 29 has had cosmetic surgery.

Social media has changed the way younger consumers relate to fashion. It’s hard to believe, but back in the 1990s, the notion of photographers posting runway imagery online was scandalous. Designers lived in professional terror of having their entire collection posted online, fearing that it would lead to business-killing knockoffs. And while knockoffs and copies continue to frustrate designers, the real revolution brought on by the internet was that consumers were able to see, in nearly real time, the full breadth of the fashion industry’s aesthetic.

In the past, runway productions were insider affairs. They weren’t meant for public consumption, and the people sitting in the audience all spoke the same fashion patois. They understood that runway ideas weren’t meant to be taken literally; they were oblivious to issues of cultural appropriation, racial stereotypes, and all varieties of isms—or they were willing to overlook them. Fashion’s power brokers were carrying on the traditions of the power brokers who’d come before, happily using black and brown people as props in photo shoots that starred white models who had parachuted in for the job.

But an increasingly diverse class of moneyed consumers, a more expansive retail network, and a new media landscape have forced the fashion industry into greater accountability on how it depicts beauty. Clothing and cosmetic brands now take care to reflect the growing numbers of luxury consumers in countries such as India and China by using more Asian models.

Marked by beauty

We’ve been chasing beauty for millennia, primping and painting our way to a more desirable ideal. Cultures in every era have held different standards of feminine beauty and myriad means of achieving it, from the toxic lead cosmetics of the past to today’s Botox injections. But the standards often serve the same aims: to attract and retain a mate; to signal social status, wealth, health, or fertility; and of course, to simply feel beautiful.

Social media has amplified the voices of minority communities—from Harlem to South Central Los Angeles—so that their calls for representation can’t be so easily ignored. And the growth of digital publications and blogs means that every market has become more fluent in the language of aesthetics. A whole new category of power brokers has emerged: influencers. They are young and independent and obsessed with the glamour of fashion. And fashion influencers don’t accept excuses, condescension, or patronizing pleas to be patient, because really, change is forthcoming.

The modern beauty standard in the West has always been rooted in thinness. And when the obesity rates were lower, thin models were only slight exaggerations in the eyes of the general population. But as obesity rates rose, the distance between the reality and the fantasy grew. People were impatient with a fantasy that no longer seemed even remotely accessible.

Fat bloggers warned critics to stop telling them to lose weight and stop suggesting ways for them to camouflage their body. They were perfectly content with their body, thank you very much. They just wanted better clothes. They wanted fashion that came in their size—not with the skirts made longer or the sheath dresses reworked with sleeves.

They weren’t really demanding to be labeled beautiful. They were demanding access to style because they believed they deserved it. In this way, beauty and self-worth were inextricably bound.

Giving full-figured women greater access made economic sense. By adhering to traditional beauty standards, the fashion industry had been leaving money on the table. Designers such as Christian Siriano made a public point of catering to larger customers and, in doing so, were hailed as smart and as capitalist heroes. Now it’s fairly common for even the most rarefied fashion brands to include large models in their runway shows.

But this new way of thinking isn’t just about selling more dresses. If it were only about economics, designers would have long ago expanded their size offerings, because there have always been larger women able and willing to embrace fashion. Big simply wasn’t considered beautiful. Indeed, even Oprah Winfrey went on a diet before she posed for the cover of Vogue in 1998. As recently as 2012, the designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died last year and who himself was 92 pounds overweight at one point, was called to task for saying that pop star Adele was “a little too fat.”

Attitudes are shifting. But the fashion world remains uneasy with large women—no matter how famous or rich. No matter how pretty their face. Elevating them to iconic status is a complicated, psychological hurdle for the arbiters of beauty. They need sleek élan in their symbols of beauty. They need long lines and sharp edges. They need women who can fit into sample sizes.

But instead of operating in a vacuum, they now are operating in a new media environment. Average folks have taken note of whether designers have a diverse cast of models, and if they do not, critics can voice their ire on social media and an angry army of like-minded souls can rise up and demand change. Digital media has made it easier for stories about emaciated and anorexic models to reach the general public, and the public now has a way to shame and pressure the fashion industry to stop hiring these deathly thin women. The Fashion Spot website became a diversity watchdog, regularly issuing reports on the demographic breakdown on the runways. How many models of color? How many plus-size women? How many of them were transgender? How many older models?

One might think that as female designers themselves aged, they would begin to highlight older women in their work. But women in fashion are part of the same cult of youth that they created. They Botox and diet. They swear by raw food and SoulCycle. How often do you see a chubby designer? A gray-haired one? Designers still use the phrase “old lady” to describe clothes that are unattractive. A “matronly” dress is one that is unflattering or out-of-date. The language makes the bias plain. But today women don’t take it as a matter of course. They revolt. Making “old” synonymous with unattractive is simply not going to stand.

The spread of luxury brands into China, Latin America, and Africa has forced designers to consider how best to market to those consumers while avoiding cultural minefields. They have had to navigate skin lightening in parts of Africa, the Lolita-cute culture of Japan, the obsession with double-eyelid surgery in East Asian countries, and prejudices of colorism, well, virtually everywhere. Idealized beauty needs a new definition. Who will sort it out? And what will the definition be?

In the West, the legacy media are now sharing influence with digital media, social media, and a new generation of writers and editors who came of age in a far more multicultural world—a world that has a more fluid view of gender. The millennial generation, those born between 1981 and 1996, is not inclined to assimilate into the dominant culture but to stand proudly apart from it. The new definition of beauty is being written by a selfie generation: people who are the cover stars of their own narrative.

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The new beauty isn’t defined by hairstyles or body shape, by age or skin color. Beauty is becoming less a matter of aesthetics and more about self-awareness, personal swagger, and individuality. It’s about chiseled arms and false eyelashes and a lineless forehead. But it’s also defined by rounded bellies, shimmering silver hair, and mundane imperfections. Beauty is a millennial strutting around town in leggings, a crop top, and her belly protruding over her waistband. It is a young man swishing down a runway in over-the-knee boots and thigh-grazing shorts.

Beauty is political correctness, cultural enlightenment, and social justice.

In New York, there’s a fashion collective called Vaquera that mounts runway shows in dilapidated settings with harsh lighting and no glamour. The cast could have piled off the F train after a sleepless night. Their hair is mussed. Their skin looks like it has a thin sheen of overnight grime. They stomp down the runway. The walk could be interpreted as angry, bumbling, or just a little bit hungover.

Masculine-looking models wear princess dresses that hang from the shoulders with all the allure of a shower curtain. Feminine-looking models aggressively speed-walk with a hunched posture and a grim expression. Instead of elongating legs and creating an hourglass silhouette, the clothes make legs look stumpy and the torso thick. Vaquera is among the many companies that call on street casting, which is basically pulling oddball characters from the street and putting them on the runway—essentially declaring them beautiful.

In Paris, the designer John Galliano, like countless other designers, has been blurring gender. He has done so in a way that’s exaggerated and aggressive, which is to say that instead of aiming to craft a dress or a skirt that caters to the lines of a masculine physique, he has simply draped that physique with a dress. The result is not a garment that ostensibly aims to make individuals look their best. It’s a statement about our stubborn assumptions about gender, clothing, and physical beauty.

Not so long ago, the clothing line Universal Standard published an advertising campaign featuring a woman who wears a U.S. size 24. She posed in her skivvies and a pair of white socks. The lighting was flat, her hair slightly frizzed, and her thighs dimpled with cellulite. There was nothing magical or inaccessible about the image. It was exaggerated realism—the opposite of the Victoria’s Secret angel.

Every accepted idea about beauty is being subverted. This is the new normal, and it is shocking. Some might argue that it’s even rather ugly.

As much as people say that they want inclusiveness and regular-looking people—so-called real people—many consumers remain dismayed that this, this is what passes for beauty. They look at a 200-pound woman and, after giving a cursory nod to her confidence, fret about her health—even though they’ve never seen her medical records. That’s a more polite conversation than one that argues against declaring her beautiful. But the mere fact that this Universal Standard model is in the spotlight in her underwear—just as the Victoria’s Secret angels have been and the Maidenform woman was a generation before that—is an act of political protest. It’s not about wanting to be a pinup but about wanting the right for one’s body to exist without negative judgment. As a society, we haven’t acknowledged her right to simply be. But at least the beauty world is giving her a platform on which to make her case.

This isn’t just a demand being made by full-figured women. Older women are insisting on their place in the culture. Black women are demanding that they be allowed to stand in the spotlight with their natural hair.

There’s no neutral ground. The body, the face, the hair have all become political. Beauty is about respect and value and the right to exist without having to alter who you fundamentally are. For a black woman, having her natural hair perceived as beautiful means that her kinky curls are not an indication of her being unprofessional. For a plus-size woman, having her belly rolls included in the conversation about beauty means that she will not be castigated by strangers for consuming dessert in public; she will not have to prove to her employer that she isn’t lazy or without willpower or otherwise lacking in self-control.

When an older woman’s wrinkles are seen as beautiful, it means that she is actually being seen. She isn’t being overlooked as a full human being: sexual, funny, smart, and, more than likely, deeply engaged in the world around her.

To see the beauty in a woman’s rippling muscles is to embrace her strength but also to shun the notion that female beauty is equated with fragility and weakness. Pure physical power is stunning.

“Own who you are,” read a T-shirt on the spring 2020 runway of Balmain in Paris. The brand’s creative director, Olivier Rousteing, is known for his focus on inclusiveness in beauty. He, along with Kim Kardashian, has helped popularize the notion of “slim thick,” the 21st-century description of an hourglass figure with adjustments made for athleticism. “Slim thick” describes a woman with a prominent derriere, breasts, and thighs, but with a slim, toned midsection. It’s a body type that has sold countless waist trainers and has been applied to women such as singer and fashion entrepreneur Rihanna who do not have the lean physique of a marathoner.

Slim thick may be just another body type over which women obsess. But it also gives women license to coin a term to describe their own body, turn it into a hashtag, and start counting the likes. Own who you are.

When I look at photographs of groups of women on vacation, or a mother with her child, I see friendship and loyalty, joy and love. I see people who seem exuberant and confident. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to speak with them, I’d find them intelligent and witty or incredibly charismatic. If I got to know them and like them, I’m sure I’d also describe them as beautiful.

If I were to look at a portrait of my mother, I would see one of the most beautiful people in the world—not because of her cheekbones or her neat figure, but because I know her heart.

As a culture, we give lip service to the notion that what matters is inner beauty when in fact it’s the outer version that carries the real social currency. The new outlook on beauty dares us to declare someone we haven’t met beautiful. It forces us to presume the best about people. It asks us to connect with people in a way that is almost childlike in its openness and ease.

Modern beauty doesn’t ask us to come to the table without judgment. It simply asks us to come presuming that everyone in attendance has a right to be there.

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What is the connection between beauty standards and mental health?

Evidence shows that beauty standards can affect individual mental health. Social media, television, and film can all portray unrealistic beauty standards and create pressure for people to look a certain way.

Beauty standards in society tell people how they “should” look. However, with the inundation of media in today’s society, there is more pressure for people, especially young females, to look a certain way and have a specific body type.

This pressure can affect the mental health of individuals. It can lead to an increased risk of low self-esteem, negative body image, eating disorders, and depression.

This article explains how beauty standards can affect mental health. It also discusses how beauty standards can lead to mental health conditions and how people can cope with these effects.

A note about sex and gender

Sex and gender exist on spectrums. This article will use the terms “male,” “female,” or both to refer to sex assigned at birth. Click here to learn more .

How do beauty standards affect mental health?

Body image concerns are a growing issue globally. With an inundation of images via social media and television, the mental health of individuals, especially females and young people, is an issue that is on the rise.

Young females are more likely to experience body image issues because females in the United States often feel pressure to measure up to unrealistic beauty standards that are placed on them by society and culture.

A meta-analysis from 2008 showed that exposure to thin-ideal body types through the media is directly related to body image concerns among females.

These body image issues can also contribute to various mental health issues, including:

• eating disorders
• self-esteem issues
• social isolation

What are beauty standards?

Beauty standards are the ideals and perceptions of beauty that society and culture place on people. They determine what is considered “beautiful” and can include height and weight, facial proportions, and body shape.

Research notes that these standards may contribute to the growing body image issues for various reasons. This includes that in the U.S. females are exposed to messages about how they should look from the moment they are born. Teens and young girls are also more likely to be given praise for how they look rather than for their actions or thoughts.

They are also constantly shown images through the media of unrealistic standards. Many of the images have been altered using technology, causing these young females to strive for body ideals and beauty that do not actually exist.

Read about social media and mental health.

Do you feel pressured by beauty standards?

You are not alone. According to a 2017 survey by the Dove Self-Esteem Project, 5 in 10 young females feel medium to high pressure to look “beautiful,” and 6 in 10 feel pressure to always look at least “acceptable.”

The survey also found that 70% of young females feel there is too much importance placed on beauty in defining happiness for females.

Beauty standards and mental health conditions

The pressure of societal beauty standards can lead to the exacerbation or development of various mental health conditions.

Low self-esteem

According to the 2017 Dove Self-Esteem Project survey, 54% of females ages 10–17 globally have low to medium body esteem.

Research from 2019 found that 10–30% of males feel dissatisfied with their bodies, with 69% of male adolescents feeling dissatisfied with their bodies due to their weight.

Body dissatisfaction can lead to poorer quality of life and psychological distress. It can also increase the risk of unhealthy eating habits and eating disorders.

Negative body image, or body dissatisfaction, can also lead to low self-esteem. This can affect various aspects of daily life. For example, an individual may choose not to be around other people or constantly obsess about how much they exercise or eat.

Read more about self-esteem.

Eating disorders

Body image is a risk factor for various eating disorders. It is also part of the diagnostic criteria for both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa .

The Dove Self-Esteem Project survey of 2017 found that globally 5 in 10 young females have put their health at risk by not eating or not going to the doctor. Among those who already experience a low body image, 8 in 10 have put their health at risk in these ways.

Body dissatisfaction can also increase a person’s risk for disordered eating and other harmful behaviors to change their appearance. This may include:

• restrictive eating
• steroid use
• using diet pills
• exercising excessively

Help is available

Eating disorders can severely affect the quality of life of people living with these conditions and those close to them. Early intervention and treatment greatly improve the likelihood of recovery.

Anyone who suspects they or a loved one may have an eating disorder can contact the National Alliance for Eating Disorders , which offers a daytime helpline staffed by licensed therapists and an online search tool for treatment options.

For general mental health support at any time, people can call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 24 hours a day at 1-800-662-4357 (or 1-800-487-4889 for TTY).

Many other resources are also available, including:

• The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders
• F.E.A.S.T. , which provides support and educational resources to friends and family who want to help someone living with an eating disorder

Learn more about eating disorders.

Research has shown a strong association between body image dissatisfaction and symptoms of depression . According to research from 2020 , this is especially true among young females who have overweight or obesity .

Other research from 2017 found that adolescents with body image dissatisfaction were 3.7 times more likely to experience and report depressive symptoms.

Research from 2017 noted that body image dissatisfaction has strong links to symptoms of anxiety disorders in adolescents. The research showed that higher baseline levels of body image dissatisfaction were directly related to higher initial symptoms of anxiety disorders, such as:

• generalized anxiety disorder
• panic disorder
• social anxiety disorder

Some people experience excessive concern about the way others perceive their bodies. These concerns about how others may judge them based on their weight, height, or body shape can cause embarrassment, worry, and shame. Some may refer to this as social physique anxiety.

Social isolation

The 2017 Dove Self-Esteem Project notes that 6 in 10 young females globally have chosen not to attend social engagement or be assertive in their opinions because of their self-esteem. Among those with low body esteem, these numbers were 8 in 10.

The survey also found that 4 in 10 young females have opted not to participate in sports or extra-curricular activities because they are not comfortable with the way their bodies look.

As females age, their body image dissatisfaction can also affect their ability to be intimate with their partner. Body dissatisfaction can, therefore, affect all aspects of a person’s life.

How people are exposed to beauty standards

Individuals, especially females, in the U.S. are exposed to societal beauty standards from the moment they are infants, throughout childhood, and into adulthood. This exposure can occur in a number of different ways.

Social media

Over the last decade or so the use of social media has grown. This is especially true among teenagers and young adults.

This has led to an increased comparison to other people’s bodies, higher levels of body dissatisfaction, and a higher drive for thinness among these groups.

A survey among teenagers in the United Kingdom found that 40% of them reported that social media images resulted in them worrying about their own bodies.

Do you feel pressure from social media?

Many people, especially young people, feel pressure from social media. This is especially true among young females. Social media brings people closer together. However, it can also affect your body image and self-esteem. It can also expose you to other issues like cyberbullying .

The American Psychological Association (APA) found that teens and young adults who reduced their social media usage by 50% for even just a few weeks saw improvement in the way they feel about their overall appearance.

If you are feeling pressure about your body or appearance, limiting your time on social media may help.

Read more about how social media affects youths and mental health .

Parents and caregivers

Parents and caregivers can have influence over children and their mental health in various ways.

According to the Office on Women’s Health , children who grow up with parents or caregivers who are constantly worried about their own weight or their child’s weight may be more likely to grow up to have a negative body image.

How to cope with the mental health effects of beauty standards

There are various ways a person can help themselves to cope with the mental health effects of beauty standards. These include :

• avoiding or deleting social media apps that cause distress over one’s image
• being mindful about the images one sees online or in the media and how they make one feel when they look at them
• modeling positive self-talk by treating oneself kindly
• being aware of the language one uses among peers and friends and the effects it can have
• speaking to a healthcare or mental health professional if the mental health effects of beauty standards begin to affect day-to-day life

Societal beauty standards can put a lot of pressure on individuals to look a certain way or have a specific body shape. The influence of these standards can affect a person’s mental health in various ways.

Beauty standards can increase the risk of eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and social isolation. This is especially true among young females.

Limiting time on social media and speaking with a mental health professional can help individuals cope with the mental health effects of societal beauty standards.

Last medically reviewed on May 1, 2024

• Mental Health
• Psychology / Psychiatry

How we reviewed this article:

• Body image. (2021). https://www.womenshealth.gov/mental-health/body-image-and-mental-health/body-image
• Body image and eating disorders. (n.d.). https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/body-image-and-eating-disorders/
• Body image and mental health. (n.d.). https://mentalhealth-uk.org/body-image-and-mental-health/
• Body image report – Executive summary. (n.d.). https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/articles/body-image-report-executive-summary
• Flores-Cornejo F, et al. (2017). Association between body image dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms in adolescents. https://www.scielo.br/j/rbp/a/t53rstnzq3LZkDQNX56mNtK/?lang=en#
• Goldfield G. (2023). Reducing social media use significantly improves body image in teens, young adults. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/02/social-media-body-image
• Grabe S, et al. (2008). The role of the media in body image concerns among women: a meta-analysis of experimental and correlational studies. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444705/
• Jiotsa B, et al. (2021). Social media use and body image disorders: association between frequency of comparing one’s own physical appearance to that of people being followed on social media and body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness. / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8001450
• McLean SA, et al. (2019). Body image in the context of eating disorders. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0193953X18311535?via%3Dihub
• Millions of teenagers worry about body image and identify social media as a key cause – new survey by the Mental Health Foundation. (2019). https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/about-us/news/millions-teenagers-worry-about-body-image-and-identify-social-media-key-cause-new-survey-mental
• Quittkat HL, et al. (2019). Body dissatisfaction, importance of appearance, and body appreciation in men and women over the lifespan. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6928134/
• Rodgers RF, et al. (2023). Body image as a global mental health concern. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9970735/
• Soares LC, et al. (2020). Body image dissatisfaction and symptoms of depression disorder in adolescents. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7727113/
• The 2017 Dove global girls beauty and confidence report. (2017). https://digitaluniversity.womendeliver.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Mod-1-2017-Dove-Global-Girls-Beauty-and-Confidence-Report.pdf
• Zartaloudi A, et al. (2023). Body image, social physique anxiety levels and self-esteem among adults participating in physical activity programs. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10204469/

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On Being and Becoming Beautiful: The Social Construction of Feminine Beauty

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An argument about beauty

Susan Sontag has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 1993. Best known as a novelist and essayist – her books have been translated into thirty-two languages – she has also written stories and plays, written and directed movies, and worked as a theatre director in the United States and Europe. In 2000 she won the National Book Award for her novel In America , and in 2001 received the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. Last year, a new collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls , was published. Her next book, Regarding the Pain of Others , will appear in early 2003, and she is also writing another novel.

Responding at last, in April of 2002, to the scandal created by the revelation of innumerable cover-ups of sexually predatory priests, Pope John Paul II told the American cardinals summoned to the Vatican, “A great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains; and this is a truth which any intellectually honest critic will recognize.”

Is it too odd that the Pope likens the Catholic Church to a great – that is, beautiful – work of art? Perhaps not, since the inane comparison allows him to turn abhorrent misdeeds into something like the scratches in the print of a silent film or craquelure covering the surface of an Old Master painting, blemishes that we reflexively screen out or see past. The Pope likes venerable ideas. And beauty, as a term signifying (like health) an indisputable excellence, has been a perennial resource in the issuing of peremptory evaluations.

Permanence, however, is not one of beauty’s more obvious attributes; and the contemplation of beauty, when it is expert, may be wreathed in pathos, the drama on which Shakespeare elaborates in many of the Sonnets. Traditional celebrations of beauty in Japan, like the annual rite of cherry-blossom viewing, are keenly elegiac; the most stirring beauty is the most evanescent. To make beauty in some sense imperishable required a lot of conceptual tinkering and transposing, but the idea was simply too alluring, too potent, to be squandered on the praise of superior embodiments. The aim was to multiply the notion, to allow for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjectives, arranged on a scale of ascending value and incorruptibility, with the metaphorized uses (‘intellectual beauty,’ ‘spiritual beauty’) taking precedence over what ordinary language extols as beautiful – a gladness to the senses.

The less ‘uplifting’ beauty of face and body remains the most commonly visited site of the beautiful. But one would hardly expect the Pope to invoke that sense of beauty while constructing an exculpatory account of several generations’ worth of the clergy’s sexual molestation of children and protection of the molesters. More to the point – his point – is the ‘higher’ beauty of art. However much art may seem to be a matter of surface and reception by the senses, it has generally been accorded an honorary citizenship in the domain of ‘inner’ (as opposed to ‘outer’) beauty. Beauty, it seems, is immutable, at least when incarnated – fixed – in the form of art, because it is in art that beauty as an idea, an eternal idea, is best embodied. Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures.

The best theory of beauty is its history. Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing on its deployment in the hands of specific communities.

Communities dedicated by their leaders to stemming what is perceived as a noxious tide of innovative views have no interest in modifying the bulwark provided by the use of beauty as unexceptionable commendation and consolation. It is not surprising that John Paul II, and the preserve-and-conserve institution for which he speaks, feels as comfortable with beauty as with the idea of the good.

It also seems inevitable that when, almost a century ago, the most prestigious communities concerned with the fine arts dedicated themselves to drastic projects of innovation, beauty would turn up on the front line of notions to be discredited. Beauty could not but appear a conservative standard to the makers and proclaimers of the new; Gertrude Stein said that to call a work of art beautiful means that it is dead. Beautiful has come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment.

Elsewhere, beauty still reigns, irrepressible. (How could it not?) When that notorious beauty-lover Oscar Wilde announced in The Decay of Lying , “Nobody of any real culture ever talks about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned,” sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux-arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up-to-date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

Even when Beauty was an unquestioned criterion of value in the arts, it was defined laterally, by evoking some other quality that was supposed to be the essence or sine qua non of something that was beautiful. A definition of the beautiful was no more (or less) than a commendation of the beautiful. When, for example, Lessing equated beauty with harmony, he was offering another general idea of what is excellent or desirable.

In the absence of a definition in the strict sense, there was supposed to be an organ or capacity for registering beauty (that is, value) in the arts, called ‘taste,’ and a canon of works discerned by people of taste, seekers after more rarefied gratifications, adepts of connoisseurship. For in the arts – unlike life – beauty was not assumed to be necessarily apparent, evident, obvious.

The problem with taste was that, however much it resulted in periods of large agreement within communities of art lovers, it issued from private, immediate, and revocable responses to art. And the consensus, however firm, was never more than local. To address this defect, Kant – a dedicated universalizer – proposed a distinctive faculty of ‘judgment’ with discernable principles of a general and abiding kind; the tastes legislated by this faculty of judgment, if properly reflected upon, should be the possession of all. But ‘judgment’ did not have its intended effect of shoring up ‘taste’ or making it, in a certain sense, more democratic. For one thing, taste-as-principled- judgment was hard to apply, since it had the most tenuous connection with the actual works of art deemed incontestably great or beautiful, unlike the pliable, empirical criterion of taste. And taste is now a far weaker, more assailable notion than it was in the late eighteenth century. Whose taste? Or, more insolently, who sez?

As the relativistic stance in cultural matters pressed harder on the old assessments, definitions of beauty – descriptions of its essence – became emptier. Beauty could no longer be something as positive as harmony. For Valéry, the nature of beauty is that it cannot be defined; beauty is precisely ‘the ineffable.’

The failure of the notion of beauty reflects the discrediting of the prestige of judgment itself, as something that could conceivably be impartial or objective, not always self-serving or self-referring. It also reflects the discrediting of binary discourses in the arts. Beauty defines itself as the antithesis of the ugly. Obviously, you can’t say something is beautiful if you’re not willing to say something is ugly. But there are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. (For an explanation, look first not at the rise of so-called political correctness, but at the evolving ideology of consumerism, then at the complicity between these two.) The point is to find what is beautiful in what has not hitherto been regarded as beautiful (or: the beautiful in the ugly).

Similarly, there is more and more resistance to the idea of ‘good taste,’ that is, to the dichotomy good taste/bad taste, except for occasions that allow one to celebrate the defeat of snobbery and the triumph of what was once condescended to as bad taste. Today, good taste seems even more retrograde an idea than beauty. Austere, difficult ‘modernist’ art and literature have come to seem old-fashioned, a conspiracy of snobs. Innovation is relaxation now; today’s E-Z Art gives the green light to all. In the cultural climate favoring the more user-friendly art of recent years, the beautiful seems, if not obvious, then pretentious. Beauty continues to take a battering in what are called, absurdly, our culture wars.

That beauty applied to some things and not to others, that it was a principle of discrimination , was once its strength and appeal. Beauty belonged to the family of notions that establish rank, and accorded well with social order unapologetic about station, class, hierarchy, and the right to exclude.

What had been a virtue of the concept became its liability. Beauty, which once seemed vulnerable because it was too general, loose, porous, was revealed as – on the contrary – excluding too much. Discrimination, once a positive faculty (meaning refined judgment, high standards, fastidiousness), turned negative: it meant prejudice, bigotry, blindness to the virtues of what was not identical with oneself.

The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty, and the caring about beauty, was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting.’

Of course, when people said a work of art was interesting, this did not mean that they necessarily liked it – much less that they thought it beautiful. It usually meant no more than they thought they ought to like it. Or that they liked it, sort of, even though it wasn’t beautiful.

Or they might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where ‘the interesting’ first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, “Yes, the photograph is interesting.”

What is interesting? Mostly, what has not previously been thought beautiful (or good). The sick are interesting, as Nietzsche points out. The wicked, too. To name something as interesting implies challenging old orders of praise; such judgments aspire to be found insolent or at least ingenious. Connoisseurs of the interesting – whose antonym is the boring – appreciate clash, not harmony. Liberalism is boring, declares Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political , written in 1932 (the following year he joined the Nazi Party). A politics conducted according to liberal principles lacks drama, flavor, conflict, while strong autocratic politics – and war – are interesting.

Long use of ‘the interesting’ as a criterion of value has, inevitably, weakened its transgressive bite. What is left of the old insolence lies mainly in its disdain for the consequences of actions and of judgments. As for the truthfulness of the ascription – that does not even enter the story. One calls something interesting precisely so as not to have to commit to a judgment of beauty (or of goodness). The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things that become interesting, the more the marketplace grows. The boring – understood as an absence, an emptiness – implies its antidote: the promiscuous, empty affirmations of the interesting. It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality.

In order to enrich this deprived take on our experiences, one would have to acknowledge a full notion of boredom: depression, rage (suppressed despair). Then one could work toward a full notion of the interesting. But that quality of experience – of feeling – one would probably no longer even want to call interesting.

Beauty can illustrate an ideal; a perfection. Or, because of its identification with women (more accurately, with Woman), it can trigger the usual ambivalence that stems from the age-old denigration of the feminine. Much of the discrediting of beauty needs to be understood as a result of the gender inflection. Misogyny, too, might underlie the urge to metaphorize beauty, thereby promoting it out of the realm of the ‘merely’ feminine, the unserious, the specious. For if women are worshiped because they are beautiful, they are condescended to for their preoccupation with making or keeping themselves beautiful. Beauty is theatrical, it is for being looked at and admired; and the word is as likely to suggest the beauty industry (beauty magazines, beauty parlors, beauty products) – the theatre of feminine frivolity – as the beauties of art and of nature. How else to explain the association of beauty – i.e., women – with mindlessness? To be concerned with one’s own beauty is to risk the charge of narcissism and frivolity. Consider all the beauty synonyms, starting with the ‘lovely,’ the merely ‘pretty,’ which cry out for a virile transposition.

“Handsome is as handsome does.” (But not: “Beautiful is as beautiful does.”) Though it applies no less than does ‘beautiful’ to appearance, ‘handsome’ – free of associations with the feminine – seems a more sober, less gushing way of commending. Beauty is not ordinarily associated with gravitas. Thus one might prefer to call the vehicle for delivering searing images of war and atrocity a ‘handsome book,’ as I did in the preface to a recent compilation of photographs by Don McCullin, lest calling it a ‘beautiful book’ (which it was) would seem an affront to its appalling subject.

It’s usually assumed that beauty is, almost tautologically, an ‘aesthetic’ category, which puts it, according to many, on a collision course with the ethical. But beauty, even beauty in the amoral mode, is never naked. And the ascription of beauty is never unmixed with moral values. Far from the aesthetic and the ethical being poles apart, as Kierkegaard and Tolstoy insisted, the aesthetic is itself a quasi-moral project. Arguments about beauty since Plato are stocked with questions about the proper relation to the beautiful (the irresistibly, enthrallingly beautiful), which is thought to flow from the nature of beauty itself.

The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments. From a Nietzschean (or Wildean) point of view, this may be improper, but it seems to me unavoidable. And the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness. Indeed, the various definitions of beauty come at least as close to a plausible characterization of virtue, and of a fuller humanity, as the attempts to define goodness as such.

Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console. The beauty of face and figure torments, subjugates; that beauty is imperious. The beauty that is human, and the beauty that is made (art) – both raise the fantasy of possession. Our model of the disinterested comes from the beauty of nature – a nature that is distant, overarching, unpossessable.

From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December of 1942: “The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotions and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience. . . .” 1

Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.

The beauty of art is better, ‘higher,’ according to Hegel, than the beauty of nature because it is made by human beings and is the work of the spirit. But the discerning of beauty in nature is also the result of traditions of consciousness, and of culture – in Hegel’s language, of spirit.

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent. As Wilde pointed out, art does more than school us on how and what to appreciate in nature. (He was thinking of poetry and painting. Today the standards of beauty in nature are largely set by photography.) What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

A happy by-product of this insight, if insight it is: beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous.

Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”

• 1 Quoted in Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 130.

On beauty (2002)

Beauty Standards and Their Impact Essay

Introduction.

Beauty generally refers to the mixture of aesthetic qualities such as form, shape and color that pleases the eyesight. Beauty is divided into two broad branches, that is, human beauty and beauty in things around us. Human beauty can also be classified into physical beauty and beauty of the soul. Beauty in things around us entails architecture and physical features.

Society at large has always put emphasis that beauty being admired and looked after trait. A good example in a society is a Marketing and Advertisement Industry that sells all everything by showcasing its beauty. Some countries however hold beauty more highly than others. Such countries include The U.S is the leading.

The physical beauty of a person opens ways for the person to get their soulmates without struggle. It is usually the first impression that makes the attraction to a mate much easier. It smoothens the bumps that life gives during the search for a soulmate. However, you should take into account that its importance fades away quickly with time. As you go through life, you realize that what you thought was beauty fades away. During this period, people tend to embark on the other kind of beauty which is the beauty of the soul. The beauty of the soul entails traits such as personality, sense of humor, intelligence and other factors that entail a person’s character.

The beauty of the things around us such as the works of architecture such as unique buildings, bridges and others and physical features such as mountains and water bodies are very important as they bring happiness and joy to our eyesight. They are used as sources of recreational facilities for both children and adults. Children go to places rich in physical features to break class monotony. Adults go to beautiful places while depressed or just while they need some refreshment. They are also used as sources of learning facilities for persons of all ages. Children go to learn new things in their environment and that is the same with adults.

All people need beauty but it depends on which type of beauty is in question. To explain this, children only find beauty in things such as toys and also in places they go. Adults on the other hand see the world clearly and thus they need beauty in everything they do and places they go. Some people however need beauty more than others. Women for example tend to be more obsessed with beauty in almost everything. They always look for perfection in their body and also in everything they do on a daily basis. This has consequently made them turn to cosmetics in order to look more beautiful. Some are now even doing surgery to modify their faces and other parts of their bodies. People always need beauty in their lives. This is always largely contributed by things around them. Take, for example, a beautiful compound with a wonderful house and a beautiful garden in the backyard that will always bring happiness and improve the lives of people living there.

As the say goes, beauty is in the beholder’s eyes. The perception of people on beauty is influenced by cultural heritage. For instance, American culture perceives youthfulness as beauty and European perceives flawless skin as an ideal beauty. In Africa, however, a filled-out large figure is referred to as beauty. In today’s society, beauty is people are beginning to relate beauty to be prosperous and happy. Many cultures have fueled the obsession with women being pretty and that in turn led to the introduction of cosmetics among different cultures. Almost all the cultures in the world value beauty so highly that many quantitative measures of beauty are constructed socially.

There are some types of beauty that the media have long forgotten and no longer classify as types of beauty. These include architecture and music. The media nowadays classify architecture as more of a science than art while the music on the other hand is long forgotten when they talk about those categories. Through the help of the media, our concepts about beauty can be globalized more so through social media networks as almost all the young people in this new generation are using social media networks and the information can travel faster.

There are many controversies about beauty in nature compared to that in human form. It is important that we consider all as having beauty but the one has more beauty than the other. Human being has a beauty that fades away with time while nature has a permanent beauty that never fades away. For example, take a look at the sky, the moon, the river and so on, their beauty last forever. Men are interested in the beauty of other things than that of their own while women always tend to be self-centered when it comes to beauty. Concerning your appearance is normal and understandable. In today’s society, everywhere you go be it at work, school, or interview, your personal appearance will always influence people’s impression of you.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the standards that society has put on women have enabled some women to thrive and become successful. Let’s take America for example, a country that produces many models and enables women to develop their careers in terms of beauty. It has led to many other opportunities such as selling cosmetics and fashion design.

The physical beauty of human beings fades away with time. The beauty of nature and of the soul is permanent. Society has set some unrealistic standards for women in terms of beauty which are vague and should be overlooked.

Skivko, M. (2020). Deconstruction in Fashion as a Path Toward New Beauty Standards: The Maison Margiela Case. ZoneModa Journal , 10 (1), 39-49.

McCray, S. (2018). Redefining Society’s Beauty Standards.

Capaldi, C. A., Passmore, H. A., Ishii, R., Chistopolskaya, K. A., Vowinckel, J., Nikolaev, E. L., & Semikin, G. I. (2017). Engaging with natural beauty may be related to well-being because it connects people to nature: Evidence from three cultures. Ecopsychology, 9(4), 199-211.

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Body Image — American Beauty Standards

American Beauty Standards

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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The evolution of american beauty standards, the impact of american beauty standards, promoting a more inclusive definition of beauty.

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Beauty Standards: What Are They And How Do They Influence Society?

Beauty canons set us the ideal aesthetics not only of the body but also of clothing, makeup… In this way they affect people’s lives to a greater or lesser extent.

However, The perfect aesthetic has varied over time and adapted to the characteristics of the society and circumstances that were experienced In this way, different trends have emerged that have influenced people’s appearance, especially that of women.

We must be careful with these established patterns, since they will always appear unattainable and can lead to self-esteem problems or even mental disorders.

In this article We will see what the beauty standards consist of and we will review the beauty ideals of different historical periods.

Table of Contents

What do we understand by beauty standards?

Beauty standards are defined as the set of characteristics of the appearance of an object or a person that society perceives and values ​​as beautiful or attractive The physical features considered beautiful or attractive have varied throughout history and are also different according to each culture.

Thus, although we can also value the beauty of objects, it is more common to talk about canons of beauty of individuals, both men and women. This established beauty pattern affects many aspects of our lives and of course our self-esteem, It influences the way we dress, comb our hair, or it can even influence what we eat and how much sport we do

Who do beauty standards affect?

As we have already stated in the previous section, when we refer to beauty standards we normally talk about people’s physical appearance, since they are the ones who are really affected by these assessments of the beauty ideal. Likewise, although currently man is also influenced by how his body should be and the ideal appearance of it, Women have always been the most affected and criticized for their physical appearance

The problem with these patterns or characteristics of beauty is that they are unattainable and that they don’t allow anyone to ever be satisfied , since it can always be improved or perfected. They thus create slaves to these unreal aesthetics.

It is surprising to see how an image imposed by society, which may not be in accordance with our tastes, can impact our self-esteem and mean that we are never satisfied; we enter a vicious circle in which we will always want more beauty influenced by society that also teaches us to never settle and that we can always be better.

These beauty demands marked by society are a great burden that affect increasingly younger ages, giving greater importance to the physique with respect to any other characteristic We must be careful, because the consequences of these ideals can be very dangerous, even affecting the mental health of the subject.

Evolution of beauty canons in History

Beauty standards are not stable over time, but rather vary depending on the era. The speed with which they have been changing has also been different, and currently we find ourselves with a more accelerated pace of change

Likewise, the way of making the canons known and conveyed to society has also changed. Before it was common to find them represented in paintings or sculptures or described in novels, that is, in art, but currently new technologies allow them to quickly reach everyone, making it easier for everyone to show their image.

1. Prehistoric era

Thanks to different archaeological discoveries such as the famous Venus of Willendorf, a small statue of a woman discovered in Austria and dating from 22,000 to 24,000 years ago, we can deduce that beauty in women was represented with large and round bodies with voluminous breasts and wide hips, characteristics that were linked to fertility and a greater probability of not having complications during childbirth.

2. Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages the ideal of beauty was influenced by the belief in God. With the emergence of the Christian faith, people conceive the creation of the human being at the hands of God, the latter being the one who gives rise to beauty At this time, another type of beauty also begins to be valued, such as inner beauty, the spiritual part of the subject.

In the paintings of this historical period we observe that attractive women were represented with white skin, long blonde hair, small nose and eyes, rosy cheeks, slim body, small breasts and narrow hips Nor was much makeup used, since natural beauty was sought, just as it had been created by God.

Regarding the male sex, The ideal man was represented as virile and with a military physique, prepared for combat ; Thus, athletic and strong men were painted, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, long and thin legs and with developed calves.

3. Renaissance

The Renaissance (15th-16th century), despite showing some differences with the previous era, maintained some characteristics in the beauty style such as white skin, although in this historical period women were shown with slightly more rounded bodies and hips. Also We find differences in the dresses, these being more ostentatious

Although there is still the influence of religion and the previous era, lightly clothed, naked bodies are beginning to be represented, both in paintings and sculptures; This is the case of Michelangelo’s David or the birth of Venus and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It is curious how these authors They begin to consider measurements and proportions typical of mathematics to create an attractive aesthetic

During the Baroque (XVII-XVIII) the characteristics of the Renaissance were mostly maintained, but a more pompous aesthetic was introduced, in the same way as the decoration at that time, which was more ornate. It was typical to use wigs, corsets and powerful perfume and makeup began to be used more It was common for both men and women to paint a mole.

A notable painter was Peter Paul Rubens, who depicted women in a sensual manner and men with muscular bodies, although in both cases they were not thin bodies but fleshy and curvy.

5. Victorian Era

In the Victorian era (1837-1901) the beauty traits sought by women were white skin with a sickly face, watery and bulging eyes. At this time, men no longer used makeup, and women’s use was also reduced, as it was associated with prostitution and vulgarity.

To achieve the desired appearance, people begin to use creams and natural remedies of dubious effectiveness that could even harm their health , such as drinking vinegar to preserve and further mark the sickly and fragile appearance or putting Belladonna in the eyes, which was a poison they used to keep the eyes red. In reference to hair, it was also common to use oils to keep it shiny and long, and it was normally worn up in curls and braids.

An important figure at this time was the writer Jane Austen, who featured strong, natural-looking women as protagonists of her works. Women appear more liberated not only aesthetically but also in the social sphere, although as we have said they were still slaves to aesthetics, since they decreased makeup, but increased the use of cosmetic products or the use of corsets.

6. 20th century

During the 1920s, corsets lost popularity and women showed a simpler appearance ; It was common to have short hair and straight-waisted clothes. As for makeup, dark tones were used on both the eyes and lips and they maintained a preference for white skin, with straight or drooping eyebrows.

In the 30s, a more feminine aesthetic is sought, with more marked eyes, cheekbones, more arched and thinner eyebrows, start using eyeliner and she continues to keep her hair short but of a lighter color. Regarding the dresses, these are more fitted, hugging the figure more.

The 40s are marked by the Second World War; In this way, physical appearance loses importance and given the scarcity of raw materials, many women make their own clothes. The eyeliner becomes thicker, as does the lipstick, which aims for a fuller appearance. The hair is usually worn up in waves.

In the 1950s, the exemplary image of women consisted of being a good wife, a good mother capable of keeping the house well organized and clean, always maintaining an impeccable appearance. Also the first “sex symbols” appear , as is the case with Marilyn Monroe at the end of this year. The marked eyeliner remains, although thicker eyebrows were common.

During the 60s, a youthful aesthetic was characteristic, with marked eye makeup, long eyelashes (often false) and soft lips. Hair with volume is promoted (it was also typical to use hairpieces) and long bangs. In terms of fashion, miniskirts and bell-shaped dresses combined with boots were common.

In the 70s there was an expansion of the different fashion trends, with various trends appearing such as rock, punk or hippie. The fight for women’s rights, sexual liberation and a more natural and spiritual conception of beauty begins

In the 80s, the diversification of styles continued, giving rise to more urban tribes, such as heavy metal or new forms of punk. There is beginning to be an influence from the United States, typical of television series, with a very colorful image of both the clothes and the makeup and the hair with a lot of volume using hairspray

During the 90s, aesthetic diversity was maintained, but clothing was sought to be more comfortable, simpler and less flashy. Hair could be worn either down or in a high ponytail and blonde highlights were typical.

Currently, beauty standards present us with an athletic and slim body that is achieved with good nutrition and physical exercise , that is, with a healthy life. The physically ideal woman is tall, thin and with long legs and a flat stomach, a small waist and large but firm breasts, the typical measurements 90-60-90. If we focus on the face, we are looking for a youthful appearance without wrinkles, large eyes, full lips, small nose, tanned skin and long hair.

As for men, they are also beginning to care more about their appearance, seeking to be muscular, without a belly, giving equal importance to hair and body hair removal.

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The Evolution of Beauty Standards Through History

Beauty, a concept as subjective as it is elusive, has been a driving force shaping societies, cultures, and individual perceptions throughout history. From ancient civilizations to modern times, the evolution of beauty standards reflects the dynamic interplay of cultural, social, and historical influences. In this article, we embark on a journey through time to explore how ideals of beauty have evolved across different epochs and civilizations, shedding light on the diverse and ever-changing perceptions of beauty throughout human history.

Ancient Civilizations: Symbols of Divine Proportions

In ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, beauty was often associated with divine proportions and mythical symbolism. In Egypt, intricate hairstyles, elaborate cosmetics, and adorned garments were symbols of status and beauty, reflecting ideals of symmetry, harmony, and regal allure. In Mesopotamia, beauty was epitomized by smooth, youthful skin, vibrant textiles, and ornate jewelry, symbolizing wealth, fertility, and prosperity. In ancient Greece, the pursuit of beauty was intertwined with philosophical ideals of balance, proportion, and aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the sculpted forms of gods and goddesses immortalized in marble.

Medieval Europe: Piety, Purity, and Courtly Romance

During the Middle Ages, beauty standards in Europe were heavily influenced by religious piety, feudal hierarchy, and courtly romance. Pale skin, rosy cheeks, and delicate features were prized as signs of purity, modesty, and aristocratic refinement. Women adorned themselves with ornate headdresses, embroidered garments, and intricate hairstyles, while men aspired to chivalrous ideals of strength, honor, and gallantry. Beauty was often depicted in religious art as a reflection of divine grace and spiritual transcendence, shaping perceptions of virtue and aesthetic ideals in medieval society.

Renaissance: Rebirth of Classical Beauty

The Renaissance witnessed a resurgence of classical ideals of beauty inspired by the art, literature, and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli celebrated the human form in all its splendor, capturing the idealized proportions, grace, and naturalism of the human body. Beauty was revered as a manifestation of divine creation, intellect, and virtuosity, as exemplified by the ethereal beauty of Renaissance muses and mythological figures immortalized in masterpieces of art and literature.

Victorian Era: Virtue, Elegance, and Etiquette

In the Victorian era, beauty standards were shaped by notions of morality, etiquette, and social refinement. Women adorned themselves with corsets, crinolines, and bustles to achieve the idealized hourglass silhouette, epitomizing notions of femininity, modesty, and domestic virtue. Men aspired to ideals of masculinity characterized by strength, stoicism, and gentlemanly conduct. Beauty was often equated with moral character and social status, as reflected in Victorian literature, fashion, and social conventions.

Twentieth Century: Diversity, Rebellion, and Revolution

The twentieth century witnessed a paradigm shift in beauty standards, marked by cultural diversity, social rebellion, and revolutionary movements challenging traditional norms. The emergence of mass media, globalization, and consumer culture transformed beauty ideals, ushering in new standards of glamour, youthfulness, and individual expression. From the flapper culture of the 1920s to the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, beauty became a symbol of liberation, self-expression, and social change, embracing diversity and challenging conventional notions of beauty.

Twenty-First Century: Empowerment, Inclusivity, and Self-Expression

In the twenty-first century, beauty standards continue to evolve in response to changing social dynamics, technological advancements, and shifting cultural landscapes. The rise of social media, body positivity movements, and inclusive representation have challenged traditional beauty ideals, celebrating diversity, authenticity, and self-acceptance. Beauty is no longer confined to narrow standards of age, gender, or ethnicity but embraces a spectrum of identities, experiences, and expressions. Empowerment, inclusivity, and self-expression are driving forces shaping the future of beauty, inviting individuals to embrace their unique beauty and redefine societal norms in their own terms.

Conclusion: A Tapestry of Beauty Across Time

In conclusion, the evolution of beauty standards throughout history reflects the rich tapestry of human experiences, aspirations, and cultural values that have shaped societies and individuals across epochs and civilizations. From ancient symbols of divine proportion to modern expressions of empowerment and self-expression, beauty has transcended time, geography, and ideology, leaving an indelible mark on the collective consciousness of humanity. As we navigate the complexities of beauty in the twenty-first century, let us celebrate the diversity, resilience, and inherent beauty of the human spirit, embracing the beauty within ourselves and each other with grace, empathy, and appreciation for the timeless journey of beauty through history.

Tariq Riaz is a passionate web developer and content generation expert.

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Beauty Standards and Cultural Influences

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In today’s ever-evolving society, the concept of beauty is profoundly influenced by cultural norms and societal expectations. As we navigate through the diverse landscapes of beauty standards, it becomes evident that different cultures play a pivotal role in shaping our perceptions of what is considered attractive. This article delves into the intricate relationship between beauty standards and cultural influences, shedding light on how these dynamics impact individuals on a global scale.

The quest for beauty varies significantly across cultures, with each region unveiling its unique set of ideals and preferences. From traditional practices to modern trends, the beauty standards upheld by a society reflect its values and historical narratives. For instance, some cultures celebrate specific body shapes, while others emphasize facial features or skin tone. Understanding these nuances is crucial for fostering a more inclusive conversation about beauty.

Timely Trends: Beauty Standards in the Digital Age

In the contemporary landscape, the influence of digital media and global connectivity has led to a convergence of beauty ideals. Social media platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, have become powerful agents in disseminating beauty trends across borders. Timely and up-to-date information on beauty standards can be traced through the viral nature of beauty-related content on these platforms.

The impact of digital trends on local beauty standards is particularly noticeable in a city like Los Angeles, where the convergence of diverse cultures creates a dynamic beauty landscape. From makeup routines to fitness trends, individuals in Los Angeles often find themselves at the intersection of global and local beauty influences. This blending of cultural norms contributes to an ever-evolving definition of beauty within the city.

Societal Pressures and Beauty Standards

While cultural influences shape our perceptions of beauty, they also give rise to societal pressures that individuals grapple with on a daily basis. The pressure to conform to certain beauty standards can have significant consequences on mental health and well-being. Understanding the societal implications of these standards is crucial for fostering a more empathetic and inclusive society.

In the pursuit of meeting societal expectations, individuals may undergo various beauty-related practices, such as cosmetic procedures or adhering to specific fashion trends. These actions can be seen as a response to the societal quest for a standardized beauty ideal. It is essential to recognize the impact of these pressures and work towards promoting a more accepting environment that celebrates diversity.

The Role of Globalization in Shaping Beauty Standards

Globalization has played a pivotal role in shaping contemporary beauty standards by facilitating the exchange of cultural influences on a global scale. As information and trends circulate rapidly, individuals around the world find themselves exposed to a multitude of beauty ideals. This interconnectedness has both positive and negative implications, fostering a sense of unity while also contributing to cultural appropriation.

The globalization of beauty standards also poses challenges in maintaining authenticity. As cultures become intertwined, there is a risk of diluting or misrepresenting traditional beauty practices. Striking a balance between appreciating diverse beauty ideals and avoiding the commodification of cultural elements is essential for promoting a respectful global discourse on beauty.

Navigating a Culturally Inclusive Beauty Landscape

The intersection of beauty standards and cultural influences highlights the need for a nuanced and culturally inclusive approach to the concept of beauty. Embracing diversity and celebrating different cultural expressions of beauty can contribute to a more positive and accepting societal narrative. As we navigate this complex landscape, it is crucial to promote discussions that foster understanding and appreciation for the rich tapestry of beauty standards around the world.

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The Beauty Myth: Prescriptive Beauty Norms for Women Reflect Hierarchy-Enhancing Motivations Leading to Discriminatory Employment Practices

The “prescriptive beauty norm” reflects a desire to enhance gender hierarchy and contributes to social policing of women and employment discrimination practices known as the “beauty tax.”.

Cite this Article

Ramati-Ziber, Leeat, et al. "The Beauty Myth: Prescriptive Beauty Norms for Women Reflect Hierarchy-Enhancing Motivations Leading to Discriminatory Employment Practices." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2019, pp. 1-27. DOI: /10.1037/pspi0000209.

Ramati-Ziber, L., Shnabel, N., & Glick, P. (2019). The beauty myth: prescriptive beauty norms for women reflect hierarchy-enhancing motivations leading to discriminatory employment practices. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1-27. DOI: /10.1037/pspi0000209.

Ramati-Ziber, Leeat, Nurit Shnabel, and Peter Glick. "The Beauty Myth: Prescriptive Beauty Norms for Women Reflect Hierarchy-Enhancing Motivations Leading to Discriminatory Employment Practices." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2019): 1-27. DOI: /10.1037/pspi0000209.            

Leeat Ramati-Ziber

Nurit shnabel, peter glick.

• Introduction
• Methodology

American women spend an average of 45 minutes grooming each day and make up 80-90% of the $115 billion industry for beauty products, affecting both their time and financial resources.

Feminist writers have long critiqued the burden that beauty imperatives place on women. A key critique came from Naomi Wolf, who argued that after feminism’s “second wave,” the pressure placed on women to pursue beauty increased dramatically, reflecting a backlash against women’s progress and increasing power in workplaces and other domains. The “prescriptive beauty norm” (PBN), is a term that describes this social phenomenon, where women feel social pressure to intensively pursue beauty.

Social science research shows that women’s belief that their value is determined by their beauty, which translates into their self-objectification (viewing their bodies from an external perspective), negatively impacts women and gender equality. Women’s self-objectification has been found to be associated with decreased political activism for gender equality, less assertiveness in cross-gender interactions, and poorer performance on math assessments. When women are objectified (e.g., evaluated based on their appearance) observers perceive them as less competent.

This study tests cultural critics’ hypotheses, assessing 1) the motivations behind those who uphold the Prescriptive Beauty Norm (PBN), 2) the workplace backlash, known as the “beauty tax,” against women who fail to conform, and 3) the relationship between the PBN and orthodox religious values that uphold gender hierarchy.

The Prescriptive Beauty Norm (PBN) reflects a desire to enhance gender hierarchy and contributes to social policing of women and employment discrimination practices known as the “beauty tax.”

Those who subscribe to the PBN are more likely to have values and ideologies that seek to enhance gender hierarchies, or the dominance of men over women in society.

This is not the case for those who merely subscribe to beauty ideals (such as valuing certain traits like youth or thinness), or those who believe that beauty is attainable but do not demand that women pursue beauty.

When primed to think that gender hierarchies are being threatened, people who hold sexist ideals are more likely to endorse PBN.

When employees climb the professional ladder they are required to invest more in their appearance. Yet this “beauty tax”; namely, demand for extra investment is higher for women than for men.

Women face the biggest backlash when they most threaten existing power and gender hierarchies.

Female job candidates who are “insufficiently groomed” are more likely to experience backlash; namely, be judged as unqualified for the job, if they are interviewed by someone who holds sexist ideals.

This effect is particularly significant if they are interviewing for a high-power (vs. low power) job, in a predominantly masculine field.

Religiously orthodox people are more likely than secular people to endorse sexist ideals, but not the PBN. Researchers interpreted this as confirming the arguments made by feminist critics, who claimed that, in an age of increasing secularization, the PBN replaced orthodox religious values such as chastity as an alternative way to control women.

Researchers conducted six studies on a total of 1,867 adult volunteers to investigate the motivations behind and the effects of the Prescriptive Beauty Norm (PBN). To distinguish between related concepts, they designed questions in all of their studies to differentiate between three related ideals: 1) having beauty standards, such as valuing certain attributes like youth, thinness, grooming practices, 2) attainability, such as believing that can attain beauty via various practices, 3) the PBN, such as believing that women should intensively invest their time and resources into pursuing beauty.

In order to conceal the nature of the study from participants, researchers worded the statements about the PBN in neutral vocabulary, so as not to appear obviously sexist. Furthermore, in studying the relationship between the PBN and sexist ideals, the researchers separately tested for hostile sexist beliefs (such as those demeaning women) and benevolent sexist beliefs (such as idealizing women as caregivers and romantic objects). All studies were conducted using questionnaires.

Study 1a and 1b tested whether those who endorse the PBN are motivated by desires to enhance gender hierarchies. Study 2 tested whether priming participants with threats to the gender hierarchy would be more likely to endorse the PBN. Study 3 tested whether sexist people are more likely to impose a “beauty tax” to push women employees. There were 12 occupations that were tested, which fell into 6 domains: politics, natural science, insurance, prison, municipal system, and finance.

Study 4 tested the relationship between many of the previous findings and investigated whether hierarchy-enhancing motives was associated with PBN endorsement and resulted in increased backlash against female employees. Condemnation of women who failed to pursue beauty was measured through the participants’ replies to statements such as “A woman who neglects her appearance should be ashamed of herself,” “When a woman neglects her appearance it conveys disrespect to others in her environment,” “I find it disgusting that some women totally neglect their appearance,” and “Women who choose not to invest in their appearance do not harm anyone.”

Study 5 tested whether people who have experience interviewing candidates have punished female candidates who were poorly groomed by judging them to be less qualified for the job. Study 6 tested whether people with conservative religious values that uphold gender hierarchies are more likely to disavow the PBN.

Random assignment was used in multiple aspects of these studies, such as to determine which participants would receive the messages about the gender hierarchy being threatened vs. affirmed, whether participants would face a scenario of interviewing male or female job candidates, and whether a candidate in question was pursuing a low- or high-power job.

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The psychosocial value of employment: evidence from a refugee camp.

André Aciman: Why Beauty Is So Important to Us

By André Aciman Dec. 7, 2019

• Share full article

A quest for our better selves

Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it.

Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings: “The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.”

We asked a group of artists, scientists, writers and thinkers to answer this simple question: Why is beauty, however defined, so important in our lives? Here are their responses.

We’ll do anything to watch a sunset on a clear summer day at the beach. We’ll stand and stare and remain silent, as suffused shades of orange stretch over the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun, like a painter who keeps changing his mind about which colors to use, finally resolves everything with shades of pink and light yellow, before sinking, finally, into stunning whiteness.

Suddenly, we are marveled and uplifted, pulled out of our small, ordinary lives and taken to a realm far richer and more eloquent than anything we know.

Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer.

Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing. It isn’t just a feeling. Or if it is, then it’s a feeling like love — yes, exactly like love. Love, after all, is the most intimate thing we know. And feeling one with someone or something isn’t just an unrivaled condition, but one we do not want to live without.

We fall in love with sunsets and beaches, with tennis, with works of art, with places like Tuscany and the Rockies and the south of France, and, of course, with other people — not just because of who or what they are, but because they promise to realign us with our better selves, with the people we’ve always known we were but neglected to become, the people we crave to be before our time runs out.

André Aciman is the author of “Call Me by Your Name” and “Find Me.”

The marketing machines of modern life would have us believe that beauty is about physical attributes. With the benefit of the wisdom we have attained after many years spent traversing the planet as conservation photographers, we know otherwise.

Beauty has less to do with the material things around us, and more to do with how we spend our time on earth. We create true beauty only when we channel our energy to achieve a higher purpose, build strong communities and model our behavior so that others can find inspiration to do better by each other and our planet. Beauty has nothing to do with the latest makeup or fashion trends, and everything to do with how we live on this planet and act to protect it.

Every day we learn that species, landscapes and indigenous knowledge are vanishing before our eyes. That’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to reminding the world of the fragile beauty of our only home, and to protecting nature, not just for humanity’s sake, but for the benefit of all life on earth.

Committing our time, energy and resources to achieve these goals fills our lives with beauty.

Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen are conservation photographers and the founders of SeaLegacy .

Science enriches us by bringing us beauty in multiple forms.

Sometimes it can be found in the simplest manifestations of nature: the pattern of a nautilus shell; the colors and delicate shapes of a eucalyptus tree in full flower; the telescopic images of swirling galaxies, with their visual message of great mystery and vastness.

Sometimes it is the intricacy of the barely understood dynamics of the world’s molecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems that speaks to our imagination and wonder.

Sometimes there is beauty in the simple idea of science pursuing truth, or in the very process of scientific inquiry by which human creativity and ingenuity unveil a pattern within what had looked like chaos and incomprehensibility.

And isn’t there beauty and elegance in the fact that just four DNA nucleotides are patterned to produce the shared genetic information that underlies myriad seemingly unrelated forms of life?

Elizabeth Blackburn is a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

A person’s definition of beauty is an abstract, complicated and highly personal ideal that becomes a guiding light throughout life. We crave what we consider beautiful, and that craving can easily develop into desire, which in turn becomes the fuel that propels us into action. Beauty has the power to spawn aspiration and passion, thus becoming the impetus to achieve our dreams.

In our professional lives as fashion designers, we often deal with beauty as a physical manifestation. But beauty can also be an emotional, creative and deeply spiritual force. Its very essence is polymorphic. It can take on limitless shapes, allowing us to define it by what makes the most sense to us.

We are extremely fortunate to be living at a time when so many examples of beauty are being celebrated and honored, and more inclusive and diverse standards are being set, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or creed. Individuality is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Freedom is beautiful.

Beauty will always have the power to inspire us. It is that enigmatic, unknowable muse that keeps you striving to be better, to do better, to push harder. And by that definition, what we all need most in today’s world is perhaps simply more beauty.

Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough are the co-founders and designers of Proenza Schouler.

Beauty is just another way the tendency of our society to create hierarchies and segregate people expresses itself. The fact that over the past century certain individuals and businesses realized that it is incredibly lucrative to push upon us ever-changing beauty standards has only made things worse.

The glorification of impossible ideals is the foundation of the diet and beauty industries. And because of it, we find ourselves constantly in flux, spending however much money and time it takes to meet society’s standards. First, we didn’t want ethnic features. Now, we are all about plumping our lips and getting eye lifts in pursuit of a slanted eye. Skin-bleaching treatments and tanning creams. The ideal is constantly moving, and constantly out of reach.

The concept of beauty is a permanent obsession that permeates cultures around the world.

Jameela Jamil is an actress and the founder of the “I Weigh” movement .

The Life of Beauty

The sung blessing of creation

Led her into the human story.

That was the first beauty.

Next beauty was the sound of her mother’s voice

Rippling the waters beneath the drumming skin

Of her birthing cocoon.

Next beauty the father with kindness in his hands

As he held the newborn against his breathing.

Next beauty the moon through the dark window

It was a rocking horse, a wish.

There were many beauties in this age

For everything was immensely itself:

Green greener than the impossibility of green,

the taste of wind after its slide through dew grass at dawn,

Or language running through a tangle of wordlessness in her mouth.

She ate well of the next beauty.

Next beauty planted itself urgently beneath the warrior shrines.

Next was beauty beaded by her mother and pinned neatly

To hold back her hair.

Then how tendrils of fire longing grew into her, beautiful the flower

Between her legs as she became herself.

Do not forget this beauty she was told.

The story took her far away from beauty. In the tests of her living,

Beauty was often long from the reach of her mind and spirit.

When she forgot beauty, all was brutal.

But beauty always came to lift her up to stand again.

When it was beautiful all around and within,

She knew herself to be corn plant, moon, and sunrise.

Death is beautiful, she sang, as she left this story behind her.

Even her bones, said time.

Were tuned to beauty.

Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position.

Beauty is a positive and dynamic energy that has the power to convey emotion and express individuality as well as collectiveness. It can be felt through each of our senses, yet it is more magnificent when it transcends all five.

Over more than 30 years as a chef, I have experienced beauty unfolding through my cooking and in the creation of new dishes. Recipes have shown me that beauty is not a singular ingredient, object or idea, but the sum of the parts. Each dish has an appearance, a flavor, a temperature, a smell, a consistency and a nutritional value, but its triumph is the story all those parts tell together.

When my team and I launched Milan’s Refettorio Ambrosiano, our first community kitchen, in 2015, beauty was the guiding principle in our mission to nourish the homeless. We collaborated with artists, architects, designers and chefs to build a place of warmth, where gestures of hospitality and dignity would be offered to all. What I witnessed by bringing different people and perspectives around the table was the profound ability of beauty to build community. In a welcoming space, our guests had the freedom to imagine who they would like to be and begin to change their lives. In that space, beauty wielded the power of transformation.

When I visit the Refettorios that Food for Soul, the nonprofit I founded, has built around the world over the years, what strikes me as most beautiful is neither a table nor a chair nor a painting on the wall. Beauty is the spontaneity of two strangers breaking bread. It is the proud smile of a man who feels he has a place in the world. It is the emotion of that moment, and its power to fill a room with the celebration of life.

Massimo Bottura is a chef and the founder of Food for Soul .

Who wouldn’t argue that some things are objectively beautiful? Much of what we can see in the natural world would surely qualify: sunsets, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, wildflowers. Images of these scenes, which please and soothe our senses, are among the most reproduced in all of civilization.

It’s true, of course, that we’re not the only creatures attracted to flowers. Bees and butterflies can’t resist them either — but that’s because they need flowers to survive.

Lying at the opposite end of the beauty spectrum are reptiles. They’ve had it pretty bad. Across decades of science fiction, their countenance has served as the model for a long line of ugly monsters, from Godzilla to the Creature in the “Creature From the Black Lagoon” to the Gorn in “Star Trek.”

There may be a good reason for our instinctive attraction to some things and distaste for others. If our mammalian ancestors, running underfoot, hadn’t feared reptilian dinosaurs they would have been swiftly eaten. Similarly, nearly everyone would agree that the harmless butterfly is more beautiful than the stinger-equipped bee — with the possible exception of beekeepers.

Risk of bodily harm appears to matter greatly in our collective assessment of what is or is not beautiful. Beauty could very well be a way for our senses to reassure us when we feel safe in a dangerous universe.

If so, I can’t help but wonder how much beauty lies just out of reach, hidden in plain sight, simply because we have no more than five senses with which to experience the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he also serves as the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. He is the author of “Letters From an Astrophysicist.”

Beauty can stop us in our tracks. It can inspire us, move us, bring us to tears. Beauty can create total chaos, and then total clarity. The best kind of beauty changes hearts and minds.

That’s why the bravery of our girls is so beautiful — it can do all these things.

Over the past year, girls have moved us to tears with impassioned speeches about gun control, sexual assault and climate change. They have challenged the status quo and brought us clarity with their vision of the future. They have changed the hearts and minds of generations that are older, but not necessarily wiser.

Girls like Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi are fighting for the environment. Young women like Diana Kris Navarro, a Girls Who Code alumna, are leading efforts against harassment in tech. Girls like Lauren Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, and Thandiwe Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist, are speaking out against gun violence. The list goes on and on and on.

These girls are wise and brave beyond their years. They speak up because they care, not because they have the attention of a crowd or a camera. And they persist even when they’re told they’re too young, too small, too powerless — because they know they’re not.

Their bravery is beauty, redefined. And it’s what we need now, more than ever.

Reshma Saujani is the founder and chief executive of Girls Who Code and the author of “Brave, Not Perfect.”

I spend most of my waking hours (and many of my nightly dreams) thinking about beauty and its meaning. My whole life’s work has been an attempt to express beauty through design.

I see beauty as something ineffable, and I experience it in many ways. For example, I love gardening. The form and color of the flowers I tend to fill me with awe and joy. The time I spend in my garden frequently influences the shape of my gowns, as well as the objects that I choose to surround myself with. It even brings me closer to the people who have the same passion for it.

As humans, we all are more or less attuned to beauty. And because of this, we all try to engage with it one way or another — be it by being in nature, through poetry or by falling in love. And though our interaction with it can be a solitary affair, in the best cases, it connects people who share the same appreciation for it.

Beauty is what allows us to experience the extraordinary richness of our surroundings. Sensing it is like having a visa to our inner selves and the rest of the world, all at once. The interesting thing about beauty is that there is simply no downside to it: It can only enhance our lives.

Zac Posen is a fashion designer.

“The purpose of sex is procreation,” a straight cisgender man once told me, trying to defend his homophobia. “So that proves that homosexuality is scientifically and biologically wrong. It serves no purpose.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Huh,” I then said, “so … what’s the science behind blow jobs?” That shut him up real quick.

I often hear arguments that reduce human existence to a biological function, as if survival or productivity were our sole purpose, and the “bottom line” our final word. That is an attractive stance to take because it requires the least amount of energy or imagination. And for most animals, it’s the only option — the hummingbird sipping nectar is merely satisfying her hunger. She does not know her own beauty; she doesn’t have the capacity to perceive it. But we do. We enjoy art, music, poetry. We build birdfeeders. We plant flowers.

Only humans can seek out and express beauty. Why would we have this unique ability if we weren’t meant to use it? Even quarks, those fundamental parts at the core of life, were originally named after “beauty” and “truth.”

That’s why beauty matters to me. When we find beauty in something, we are making the fullest use of our biological capacities. Another way of putting it: When we become aware of life’s beauty, that’s when we are most alive.

Constance Wu is a television and film actress.

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When beauty causes harm

New podcast from students and faculty examines how toxic beauty products and unrealistic beauty expectations have led to injustices

December 21, 2022 – Maintaining society’s expected beauty standards can come at a high cost—financially, health-wise, and personally—and those costs fall most often on marginalized groups, according to a new podcast from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Beauty + Justice looks at the history and context surrounding beauty injustices, the potential impacts on health—from asthma to early menstruation to breast cancer —and the sometimes painful emotional toll of trying to attain a certain beauty standard. The podcast features guests from health care, academia, nonprofits, and clean beauty businesses to discuss, as student host Lissah Johnson says in the series trailer, “what it will take to create a more clean and equitable future of beauty for everyone.” Launched in November, there were three episodes as of mid-December, with plans for about 10 more in the coming months.

The podcast team includes Johnson, a doctoral candidate in the Biological Sciences in Public Health program who works in the lab of Kristopher Sarosiek studying how cell death gets dysregulated in ovarian cancer; Marissa Chan , a doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental Health studying community- and neighborhood-level drivers of hair product use among Black women ; and Tamarra James-Todd , Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Reproductive Epidemiology and director of the Environmental Reproductive Justice Lab .

The idea for a podcast grew out of a desire to translate research results in a way that’s useful for people and policymakers. “There’s a lot of talk about environmental justice and health equity, but we actually need to get the science into the hands of the community members who are most impacted, and also those who are in power and who can affect change,” said James-Todd.

The podcast, she added, highlights the connection between racism and how beauty products are marketed, sold, and used. “The cost isn’t just our health,” she said. “It’s also an economic cost. People of color are paying more money—a ridiculously high amount—to try to achieve Eurocentric beauty standards. Basically, we are paying more money to make ourselves sicker.”

Experts featured in the podcast series delve into various aspects of beauty injustice. Guests have included Lori Tharps, an author, storyteller, and educator best known for a book she co-authored titled “ Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America ”; Tamara Gilkes Borr, U.S. policy correspondent at The Economist, who wrote a May 2021 article about some of the hidden costs of having and maintaining Black hair; Robin Dodson, associate director of research operations and a research scientist at the Silent Spring Institute; and Blair Wylie, director of obstetrics for the 1 st region Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit and founding director of The Collaborative for Women’s Environmental Health in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. An episode planned for spring 2023 will explore the role of big business in beauty justice with Boma Brown-West, former director of EDF+Business for the Environmental Defense Fund and currently chief growth officer at the Healthy Building Network.

A tool for ‘othering’

In the series trailer, Johnson says, “The fact is beauty is not harmless, nor frivolous, or only skin deep. It’s also a source of toxic environmental exposures and a tool for othering and excluding specific groups of people.”

The episode featuring Dodson focused on the types of chemicals people are exposed to from beauty products and ways to prevent those exposures. Dodson has been involved in research that has shown that most women use products with fragrance—which can have hundreds of different kinds of chemicals —and she recommended that people choose fragrance-free products instead. Other chemicals to watch out for, she said, include phthalates, parabens, and UV filters such as benzophenone-3, which are endocrine disruptors that affect people’s hormonal systems. She also noted that levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals tend to be higher in products marketed toward and used by Black women than in products for white women.

“The majority of people do not realize that chemicals do not need to be comprehensively evaluated for safety before they are used in products that you would use every day,” said Dodson. “I think people should … start making noise and calling as much attention as we can to these issues so that things will start to change.” She suggested speaking out in support of increased transparency around products, or calling your favorite brand to complain about unsafe ingredients.

Borr discussed the social consequences of being perceived as less beautiful. For instance, she noted, a 2020 study “found that Black women with natural hair, with curly hair, were perceived as less professional and less competent than Black women with straight hair and White women with curly or straight hair.”

And while many women spend a lot of money to have their appearance meet social standards, Black women face even greater hurdles. “Black women buy nine times more products than white women do,” Borr said, noting that the Black hair industry generated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2017. “And you also have to think about the fact that women make less money than men, and on top of that, Black women make much less money than White women do, and they’re spending so much more money to show up and go to work, to have their hair be appropriate for work, for that job. It’s really mind-boggling and kind of twisted when you really think about it.”

Chan said she found the episode featuring Borr very powerful. “She highlighted … that we’re not at the point yet where Black women or Black folks can just walk out the door without considering the impact of institutional and interpersonal racism as it relates to their appearance and Eurocentric beauty standards,” she said. Johnson agreed, noting that the episode made her think about how much time it takes to get ready to leave the house “in order to not get negative comments.” She talked about what Black women call “wash day”—the whole day it takes to wash, detangle, and treat your hair. “You miss out on time for so many other things, like being with friends and family,” she said. “And as a PhD student, I don’t have seven hours to spend every week making my hair in its natural state appear in line with those Eurocentric standards of beauty and professionalism.”

James-Todd spoke of her own struggles regarding her hair. At times, she said, she has worried about wearing her hair in a natural style. “I recognize that there are perceptions of what it looks like to be a Black woman wearing your hair in its natural state, one of which is to be perceived as being militant, or being perceived as not being particularly attractive,” she said. “And that has implications for whether or not I’m taken seriously.”

Borr said that one way to move the needle on societal standards surrounding Black hair is legislation prohibiting discrimination based on someone’s hair texture and hairstyle. In September, Alaska became the 19 th state to pass such legislation, known as the CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act. Media images of women with natural Black hair can also help, she said.

Learning experience

For Chan, working on the podcast highlighted the importance of framing research toward solutions. “I think a lot of times in environmental justice and environmental health there’s a tendency to document disparities or differences in product use, which is important. But it’s also important to ask: What can people do about it, and what is the path forward in terms of achieving beauty justice? We’re really emphasizing that point through the podcast.”

Johnson, a bench scientist, said that the podcast has taught her how to be a better science communicator. “I’m a basic scientist. I’m really steeped in using technical language and scientific jargon,” she said. “But why I care about what I study are how the people of a community are affected. So really being able to explain … to a diverse audience about research [regarding beauty injustices] has been really helpful and really powerful. It’s making me more of the scientist that I want to be.”

– Karen Feldscher

Photo courtesy Tamarra James-Todd

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Beauty: Who Sets the Standards?

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Antonio Fuente del Campo, Beauty: Who Sets the Standards?, Aesthetic Surgery Journal , Volume 22, Issue 3, May 2002, Pages 267–268, https://doi.org/10.1067/maj.2002.124917

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Antonio Fuente del Campo, MD , is International Editor of Aesthetic Surgery Journal.

Aconcept of beauty is built into all of us and involves a balance between objective criteria and subjective impressions and a capacity to perceive order, symmetry, and harmony. Beauty involves an equilibrium between the whole object and its parts, as well as the various parts in relation to each other. The absence of this balance translates into the “unaesthetic.”

Since classical times, attempts have been made to define beauty. The history of the Western cultures reveals that many concepts of beauty have been celebrated at different places and times.

The ancient Greeks believed that a beautiful face was defined in terms of a harmonious proportion of facial features. For them the ideal face was divided into three equal vertical sections and was two thirds as wide as it was high. In his book, Beauty: An Analysis and Classification , Alexander Walker accepted standards of beauty that were congruent with those of classical antiquity, but he also identified the need for a degree of asymmetry.

The standard of feminine beauty exalted by Anglo-Saxon poets of the Middle Ages was a waxy, pale complexion so arduously sought that some women actually bled themselves regularly to achieve it. By the Renaissance, concepts of feminine beauty included not only physiognomy but also emotional and spiritual components, such as delicacy, fragility, mystery, and maternal tenderness.

Because of their visibility, royalty once served as prevailing models of beauty. Queen Elizabeth I and the noblewomen of her court dictated fashion by dying their hair, plucking their eyebrows, and applying heavy cosmetics to their cheeks. Before World War I, voluptuous faces and bodies were popular. Since the advent of motion pictures, the faces and bodies of Hollywood stars have often defined the parameters of our concept of beauty, whereas a few have been able to parlay their own “quirky” look in counterpoint to the prevailing standard.

Clearly, neither the classical standard of ideal beauty nor any other single standard has always been in vogue. Nevertheless, our experience and instincts tell us that a kind of beauty exists that defies history. Although some “beautiful faces,” like clothing and body conformations, go in and out of fashion, certain faces in every era are considered truly beautiful.

Moreover, the history of beauty in Western culture is only one part of a much larger story. What about the concepts of beauty among Asians, Indians, Laplanders, Mongols, or Mayas? All these cultures have their own concepts of beauty, each with its own history and evolution. In fact, we could say that each person has his or her own concept of beauty, established by both culture and tradition and by individual temperament and sensibility. At the same time, a beloved face that is less than perfect is often found beautiful regardless of any cultural or historical standard.

So, then, given all this, who sets the standards for facial beauty? For the aesthetic surgeon, this is not only a question of philosophy, history, or culture, but part of everyday professional experience. Through their films, TV, magazines, and other mass media, the developed countries have spread their prototypes of beauty globally, influencing the original concepts held by other cultures and ethnic groups. Presentations at our international congresses demonstrate the interest of patients in changing their original look, not only to become beautiful by the traditional standards of their own cultures, but often to look as similar as possible to the Hollywood star prototype. How many times has a patient asking for facial aesthetic surgery brought with him or her the picture of some actor or actress from a magazine as a model? Nothing escapes the influence of media and communications.

The plastic surgeon has the opportunity to generate transcendental beauty, but how is it to be defined? Which are the right components? How can they be pulled together? Although there are many factors to consider, perhaps the most important point is that, independent of the current concept of beauty, the ultimate goal of aesthetic surgery is to harmonize the body with the spirit, allowing the patient to perceive his or her own image to be in harmony with the surrounding world.

Editor's Note: The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery is now featuring “The Art of Beauty: A Virtual Museum Tour” on its Web site. “The Art of Beauty” is a multimedia presentation examining cultural ideals of beauty as depicted in works of art throughout history. It also seeks to educate the public about how aesthetic surgery contributes to our modern-day ability to look and feel our very best. Visit “The Art of Beauty” at www.surgery.org .

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Beauty Is Skin Deep; The Self-Perception of Adolescents and Young Women in Construction of Body Image within the Ankole Society

Ruth kaziga.

1 Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Mbarara 1410, Uganda; gu.ca.tsum@izugnuhcumc (C.M.); [email protected] (D.A.)

Charles Muchunguzi

Dorcus achen.

2 RHEA, Centre of Expertise on Gender, Diversity and Intersectionality, Vrije Universitet Brussels, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Susan Kools

3 School of Nursing, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 800826, 202 Jeanette Lancaster Way, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA; ude.ainigriv@h9kms

Associated Data

Not applicable.

Introduction: Adolescents and young women become increasingly aware of their bodies through images presented to them through social structures during their developmental stage. These images may drive them toward unhealthy behaviors including overeating, starving, and skin bleaching. This paper is part of a study that examined the Older Adolescent Banyankole Girl’s Response to the socio-cultural constructions of body image in The Ankole Region, Uganda. It aimed to understand the self-perceptions of adolescent girls of their body image within Ankole society. Methods: The study collected narrative interviews of 30 adolescent and young adult females (16–24) recruited from various institutions of learning as well as the Ankole community of southwestern Uganda. Results: Adolescent girls’ perceptions of beauty were influenced by pull and push factors that included beauty expectations, beauty comparisons, relationships, and dietary habits that keep them oscillating between traditional and contemporary beauty ideals. Findings suggest that young women could benefit from social shifting of focus from physical appearance to other valuable developmental assets. Conclusion: Government-sponsored programs that provide education and positive media messages may be beneficial to building the self-esteem of young women.

1. Introduction

Several studies have found significant links between well-being and positive body image in adolescent girls and young women. From a very young age, they are told that how you look is important to them and others who look at them [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Cultures all over the world put women and girls’ bodies at the center of intrigue based on connotations attached to beauty such as goodliness and sexuality. Studies have showed that young girls may obsess over their appearance making other aspects of development less important, such as education or independence [ 3 ]. According to [ 4 , 5 ], girls may adopt unhealthy eating habits such as skipping meals at school and at home so as to strive for the Western standard of beauty that values slenderness. The study reveals that when adolescent girls are still going through the bodily changes of puberty, this makes it even more challenging for them to achieve the societal standards of female beauty.

In adolescent development, there are certain aspects in society that are fixed on how young people behave rather than simply the changes of a growing body or cognitive structures. Individualistic cultures in Europe and South Africa place more emphasis on self-esteem [ 6 ]. In contrast, in collectivist societies such as Uganda, self-perceptions of body image can be based on the societal norms. Studies show that social expectations have an influence on young peoples’ ideologies [ 7 ]. The study shows that the existing beauty standards in Ankole play a role in how young girls feel about their bodies.

With embedded norms with relevance to society of how one should look, overwhelming pressure is put on girls to conform, which in turn affects their self-esteem when they do or do not meet these norms [ 8 ]. Adolescent and young women (16–24) who are at the age of self-discovery have formed their perceptions of beauty images that are usually unattainable based on societal influences [ 9 ]. Research shows that there is an association between the social environment and the behaviors, feelings, and thoughts of individuals. These thoughts are usually passed on from parents, peers, and overt messages that encourage the “appearance culture” [ 10 ].

1.1. Aims of the Study

This study focused on the first objective of a PhD study on older adolescent Banyankole Girls’ Response to sociocultural construction of body image in The Ankole Region, Uganda. Its purpose was to explore perceptions of body image and how adolescent girls responded to these perceptions in Ankole. A secondary aim was to explore the lives of adolescents and young women who are candidates for marriage and advanced society roles in Uganda, and live at the crossroads as to which society’s body image ideals they should ascribe to; either the traditional and conservative or the modern and liberal societies.

The study was guided by socio-cultural theory [ 11 ] supplemented by Foucault’s theory of the body [ 12 , 13 ] and Higgins’ self-discrepancy theory [ 14 ]. The socio-cultural theory elucidates the importance of societal norms and their influence on young people’s cognitive perceptions of the body. Adolescent girls and young women in the study are shown to react toward society’s view of appearance; for example, in the traditions put in place, we see the rural Ankole society encouraging female fattening. Furthermore, the media encourage women to adhere to expectations of beauty. Foucault’s theory of the body explains the ethos surrounding the female body image from the past notion of its sole biological purpose and sexuality, which has been used to oppress women [ 12 , 15 ]. Higgins self-discrepancy theory points out that young people’s self-perceptions are influenced by comparisons with others.

1.2. Background and Significance

In societies across Africa, female beauty ideals have been used to explain perceptions of one’s fertility, gender role identity for women, and the distribution of economic and political power in society [ 16 ]. Perceptions regarding beauty and body types vary between cultures across the world and have changed significantly across history [ 6 ]. In the past, most African countries beauty standards of women reflected a husband and father’s wealth and power, and this standard is still sought after; for example, in the Efik of Calabar cross river state in Nigeria, fat women symbolize fertility and well-being [ 16 ]. While studies underscore that many traditional societies covet fat as a sign of wealth and health [ 16 ], others show that some of the contemporary societies in Europe, Asia, and North America encourage slenderness among young women as shown through media [ 3 , 9 ].

In pre-colonial times, Ankore was a part of the Chwezi empire the ruled the Great Lake’s region of East Africa, which is now in southwestern Uganda [ 17 ]. It was a traditional kingdom that was abolished in 1967 by President Milton Obote and has not been officially restored. While the kingdom was abolished, people continue to maintain this cultural identity [ 15 , 17 ]. This society has two groups subgroups within Ankole culture with a common ancestry: the Bairu and Bahima. Both ethnic groups’ standard of beauty is characterized by a slender nose, thin lips, finely-shaped heads, fat backsides, and fat legs [ 18 ]. According to [ 16 , 19 ], in Ankole culture, the beauty standard is fat. A fat body composition for the Ankole woman has been traditionally indicative of fertility, sexuality, and morality. Body image for Ankole women is also tied to moral norms [ 18 ]. Among the Bahima of Ankore, there is a beauty ritual of female fattening during adolescence to ensure that their women develop to be fat. Fattening among women engenders a great sense of respect within and outside of the family [ 16 ]. Fattening is similar to the past practice of the Bairu in Ankole, in which for preparation of marriage, young women are bulked up to the size of a millet basket [ 18 ].

While these traditional practices looked to fatness as a symbol of beauty in Ankole, the trend for young women has begun to shift in the contemporary world. Research and the press [ 4 , 20 ] have shown that over time, beauty trends in Uganda have changed due to Westernized views on what it means to be beautiful; therefore, this has encouraged many girls and young women to maintain an unhealthy body weight, as well as the practice of fattening. The young women have adopted the global standards that idealize being thin and curvy. Women and girls are starving themselves and bleaching their skin to match the Westernized images in the media [ 4 ]. These changing trends may put young women at risk for self-hatred toward their bodies [ 4 , 5 ].

Although young women of Uganda have more recently embraced the thin ideal of beauty from the West, tradition is still an important factor of growing up [ 4 ]. Some young women, especially those in the rural areas, still look to fatness as the beauty ideal. This has led to the failure of many rural girls to maintain a healthy body size, resulting in health risks such as obesity and cardiovascular disease [ 21 ]. Research suggests that girls who struggle with a negative self-esteem are more likely susceptible to harmful societal messages and struggle with body dissatisfaction [ 1 ]. A negative body image is not only connected to low self-esteem and decreased well-being, but it is also related to serious long-term psychological consequences, such as depression, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, and poor performance in school [ 4 ].

2. Materials and Methods

A phenomenology research design was used, collecting and analyzing young women’s stories from their lived experiences [ 5 , 22 ]. By directly querying individuals about their lives, this research design allowed for the exploration of the range of subjective experiences young people have. Through triangulation of interview data with field notes of observations of the young women in their urban and rural community contexts, the researcher focused on past and current experiences of participants related to the influence of sociocultural factors and how they have influenced their thought process about their bodies over time [ 2 ].

The sample included 30 adolescent and young adult girls, both in school (high school and universities) and out of school in the age range of 16 to 24. In this study, 16–18-year-olds were considered to be in the developmental phase of late adolescence, while 19–24-year-olds were considered to be young or emerging adults. In Uganda, these ages include school-going people and those out of school and already married [ 23 ]. Young people both in and out of school were sampled, as it was assumed that those in school may be shown to be more influenced by peers and educators, while those with less or no form of formal education may be largely influenced by traditional norms and families [ 23 ]. Participants that identify as married are shown to be largely influenced by their spouse/significant other. This sample represented the nine districts of a southwestern region of Uganda. Among the participants, 5 adolescents and 7 young women were from the urban regions of Mbarara and Kampala, while 2 adolescents and young women were selected from each of the 9 rural districts of Ankole, respectively. All were of the Ankole culture.

Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants from universities, workplaces, and communities, where a notice was posted to encourage research volunteers to take part in the study. Snowball sampling was based on referrals from participants [ 24 ]. Participants from high schools were recruited by the head teacher; then, the selected students would refer other students. While recruitment from the community was based on telephone and face-to-face recruitment, those selected would then refer other participants. The inclusion criteria were that participants were between the ages of 16 and 24 years of age and had to belong to the Banyankole tribe.

Data collection procedures. Research assistants and the first author conducted semi-structured interviews in communities and workplaces of participants in the location they preferred. Interviews lasted between forty-five minutes and an hour and half. The interview questions were organized around the objectives of the study and included questions such as “How would you describe a beautiful woman in the Ankole culture?” “Considering your body and the way it looks, how do you fit within the Ankole culture beauty standards?” (see Appendix A for Interview Guide). Saturation was reached when participants gave no new information and themes were exhausted. Field notes were made on observations during the interview by research assistants and the first author, including the context where the interview took place and the nonverbal behavior of the participants in response to the questions. Observations were made on how participants approached the interview sessions and their reactions toward certain interview questions, especially those that triggered them. Observations were also made at the Ankole museum of Uganda, where different artifacts on traditional beauty in Ankole are displayed. The data were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim with participants identified with numbers to protect confidentiality.

Data analysis. Transcripts and field notes were coded manually to formulate themes using the process of thematic analysis as described by [ 25 ]. The goal of thematic analysis was to derive themes that were able to explain and address the study aims [ 26 ]. By using the six phases of thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke (2012), interview transcripts were read multiple times to develop an understanding of the participants’ experiences, highlighting information that stood out and making notes against the data.

Coding was done manually by the first author on a hard copy of the transcript. A hybrid approach to analysis was used including inductive coding directly from the data and deductive coding from a priori concepts developed from the literature [ 1 , 2 ], including relationship influences and beauty comparisons. Similar codes were color coded, categorized, and eventually merged into themes. For example, beauty descriptions of the young women were clustered into the beauty expectations theme. In this way, patterns were identified using codes and categories, and more abstract themes were developed based on inductive codes, existing literature, and theoretical underpinnings [ 25 ]. Then, they were reviewed again to assure that they were relevant to the study aims, and where appropriate, some subthemes were merged into larger themes. Lastly, the themes were labeled in a concise, clear manner.

The most salient, central theme that emerged related to the perceptions of Ankole adolescents and young women on body image was beauty expectations. It was by far the most prominent theme in participant responses. Relevant subthemes were discreet, yet interrelated and organized around the central theme of beauty expectations, including internal and external comparisons, relationship influences, and dietary habits (see Figure 1 ). The central theme and subthemes will be presented with data illustrations.

Relationship between beauty expectations and subthemes.

3.1. Beauty Expectations

Findings revealed that participants have preconceived perceptions of beauty, and these perceptions are shown to change over time because of the amount of exposure which is seen through societal influences that include media, peers, parents, and culture. Participants’ views and expectations are shown to change when they left rural areas for urban areas to work or study, while participants who remained in rural settings are shown to have been largely influenced by traditional Ankole culture. Both Bairu and Bahima participants described a beautiful woman as fat with wide hips and big buttocks and decently dressed. All participants from rural Ankole described a beautiful woman from Ankole as fat with a small waist and big buttocks. She should be dark-skinned, have short black hair, long arms with slender fingers, big legs, but also at the same time, a beautiful woman had to be decently dressed.

When asked to describe a beautiful woman in Ankole, participant 3 explains that:

She is fat! The Bahima love fat! That is why, the girl is given milk for her to become fat, get stretch marks, in the past, girls used to cut off their hair and dress up with beads to bring the allure of beauty and pride. (Participant 3 is a 19-year-old from rural Ankole)

However, 10 of the participants identified that beauty and ethics coincide together; one cannot be beautiful and yet behave badly; morals play an important role in beauty expectations. One young woman said:

Beauty is not only skin deep, but it is also aligned with proper manners and etiquette, big and beautiful women, take their time, are graceful in their walk and talk, and are not in a rush because they know what they are doing. (Participant 1 is a 24-year-old from rural Ankole)

While the two subgroups in Ankole had similar beauty expectations of a young woman, there are different traits. Participants who identified as Bairu described a beautiful woman in Ankole as one who is energetic with tough features that indicated that she worked well as a farmer. Participants who identified as Bahima explained that culturally, a beautiful woman is one with a soft and fat body, indicating that there should be no fieldwork.

Participant 8, a 20-year-old Mwiru from the Mwiru subgroup from Mitooma, a rural area in Ankole, explains that culturally, a beautiful girl is one that:

Among the Bairu, a beautiful girl that you can see must be tall. Maybe she is black or she is brown. She is energetic. By energy I mean, we usually engage in farming, so we know how to dig so we have tough hands.

Participant 3 is from Kiruhura, a rural area largely populated by the Bahima; she describes a beautiful woman as one:

A beautiful woman usually has a soft and fat body, with small baby-like fingers, usually, they will not engage in field work, they have delicate-like features, it shows that she’s well taken care of by her family.

Observations made at the Ankole museum in Mbarara supplemented participants’ perceptions of beauty expectations of a young woman in Ankole. These were shown in a historical portrait of a young woman in Ankole. These were physical traits derived from nature and the environment around. For example:

A beautiful woman in Ankole has eyes like stars, snow-white teeth, smooth and well-built arms, reed-like fingers, hair-like tree canopy, a neck of a water jar, breasts like a young fruit, a waistline of a wasp, hips of a churning gourd, legs like a banana stem and finally a baby’s foot. (A portrait of a beautiful woman in Ankole at the Mbarara Museum)

When asked if they met these beauty expectations, participants who did not fit these expectations considered themselves as not beautiful. Results show that 20 out of the 30 participants reported a lack of confidence toward their bodies brought on by the beauty expectations in Ankole. This was based on a couple of interview questions that queried their views on whether they met these standards (see Appendix A for interview questions). Participants from urban centers and contemporary Ankole reported having self-hate and low confidence because while in rural Ankole, a fat woman was beautiful, this was not the case in the cities. A young woman reported all her friends walk around with curvy bodies (in this case a small waist and large buttocks and hips). Her perception is that she is ugly because she cannot gain weight and have a body similar to those of her friends.

Interviewer: Do you think you fit in these beauty expectations in Ankole?

Participant 5 is a 21-year-old from rural Ankole:

Unfortunately, I don’t. I am a very slender girl with tiny hips and a very small bum. I have a boyish body that I hate so much. My friends and family have told me to drink a lot of milk and eat more food but until now I have not gained weight.

Most participants from towns and cities reported that beauty expectations of a young woman in Ankole meant that she had to be medium in size, have a slender nose, chocolate skinned, and long curly hair, while four of the participants described a beautiful woman as one with light skin with a slender body. All the 12 participants from the cities describe a fat woman as one that was unhealthy and lazy. Out of the 12 participants who lived in the city, seven had been born and raised in the city, while five had left the rural areas to find better jobs and education in the city.

Participant 7, a 20-year-old woman from urban Ankole, voiced her desire to be slender; she believes slenderness is synonymous to healthy. She said:

You see our parents think a very fat woman is a beautiful woman in Ankole. My parents insist that I look beautiful when I have gained weight; however, when I go back to the city my friends will make fun of me and call me a big mama so I have a hard time keeping a healthy weight. If I am not starving myself, I am overeating.

When asked about the perfect body in Ankole, the majority of participants identified a medium body as the perfect body. Participants who reported to not fit the ideal body were more likely between the ages of 20 and 22, and they described having no self-assurance toward their bodies, reporting dangerous eating habits such as using diet pills and/or overeating.

When asked if they believed they fit in the perfect Ankole ideal, participant 10, a 21-year-old from an urban area, believed that:

I don’t fit that perfect ideal body, I have always had a protruding tummy, and yet beautiful girls should have wasp waists and tiny tummies, I have tried starving myself, but a friend of my mine [said] to always drink lemon water, so I hope I see changes very soon.

However, results show that there were contradictory responses from young women and girls based on where they lived. Participants who described themselves as having the “right body” were more likely still living with their parents and had not been influenced by outside factors, such as the media. These participants perceived themselves as fat and dark-skinned, which is an ideal body sought after in rural Ankole despite their age. However, one should note that participants from urban centers who perceived their bodies as “just right” identified not too slender and not too fat but “medium” and chocolate skinned as the perfect body. This seemed to be based on influences such as the media and bodies of that of Beyoncé and Anita Fabiola (celebrities) and the fashion industry. Participant 12, a 20-year-old who lives and studies in the capital city, describes it as a place highly Westernized. She believed that everyone was aspiring toward what they see on TV and social media. She says:

I still believe that light skin is the beautiful and skinny just average weight but not very skinny, like a medium-size, small waist, and a relative bum not like mine (laughing) don’t go crazy. In terms of hair, I don’t have any preference because people look nice with short hair, long hair but I still believe in the whole light skin and the curvy body as beautiful.

In Uganda, people’s bodies are commonly described using figures to depict body figures. These figures ranged from one to nine. This is a continued and common practice for young and older people when describing one’s body. The figure one describes a slender body without curves that is usually masculine, while the figures six depicts a pear-shaped figure, while eight describes an hourglass figure, figure and figure nine refers to when one has a larger upper body than the lower body. So, when describing what is considered to be beautiful, participants had various yet similar descriptions of a beautiful woman in Ankole. In this case, when participants described their appearance, they associated their bodies with figures one to nine. Figures six and eight described the sought-after body while figures one and nine were used to describe an “ugly body”. Participants who did not identify with figures “six” and “eight” reported negative feelings toward their bodies. A “figure six” body was described by participants to mean that one has a slimmer upper body and a larger lower body with “big hips and buttocks”, while “figure eight” meant one’s body had bigger breasts a “wasp”-like waist and a large behind. Figures one and nine were described by participants as the least desirable bodies.

“Figures one and nine” are the ugliest, where one usually doesn’t have curves, hips, and a bum they’re sticks and built like boys, no man would want a woman who is built like a man or boy because then who will be the man in the relationship.

“Figures six and eight” are very feminine, my friends and mother tell me that when you have big hips, giving birth will be very easy so having big hips is very important, this is why I drink a lot of milk to ensure that my hips continue growing bigger.

Again, one should note that the results show contradictory statements from participants from rural and contemporary urban Ankole. Participants from rural Ankole identified a fat woman as the ideal body type based on images from their parents and cultural traditions, while participants from contemporary Ankole identified a slender and curvy woman as the ideal body type based on images in the media.

I think Nicki Minaj has a great body, she may be cosmetically enhanced but I think that’s what a perfect body looks like. (Participant 12)

3.2. Internal and External Comparisons

Results indicated that participants made comparisons of their bodies with what they see in the media, among friends and peers, in their homes and their community. Comparisons include the young woman’s own thoughts about how their body compares with others (internal beauty comparison), as well as those stemming from criticisms or comments from those in their social network (external beauty comparisons). These comparisons have been shown to influence their self-perceptions of beauty, in turn encouraging feelings of self-hate and lack of confidence.

When asked when body criticism began in their lives, most stated that they began to notice differences with their bodies and other girls and women when they turned 12 and 13 years old. This was usually pivotal when they began high school or started their first period. Results showed that their comparisons with friends and peers was notable to them in evaluation of their own beauty. Participants reminisced on their first time they developed a negative body image. However, it should be noted that body preferences differed with age. For example, for participants whose bodies began to change rapidly during puberty with enlarged hips and breasts, they developed a negative body image and were more likely engaged in risky relationships because such features meant that they had become women and were mature enough to engage in such behavior such as sex and drinking alcohol.

When asked when body criticism from peers and others in the community began, participant 12, born and raised in the city, reflected back when she was just 13 and how she felt about her body:

When I turned 13, my friends would point out that my hips were of a woman and that my breasts were big. Whenever I would walk back home, taxi men would tell me that my body was that of a grown woman and that I should just stay home and get married and have children. I hated walking back to school fearing that they would touch me and make more stupid comments.

Participants over the age of 16 in significant relationships who described their bodies as too thin and reported having negative feelings and self-hate toward their bodies resorting to overeating, because a small body meant that one was not feminine enough, and they were associated with children. Small breasts, small hips, and a small behind meant participants were not yet young women. One 21-year-old woman from the city described her time growing up, when all her friends started showing off their growing breasts, yet she had not grown an inch. She felt insecure when comparing herself with her friends:

When I turned 16, my breasts did not grow like the rest of my friends, I tried everything they told me for them to get bigger like I rubbed fruit on my breast every night hoping that they grow, my friends would make fun of me until they eventually came when I turned 18.

Similarly, the study showed that the perceptions of peers and others of their bodies affected the way the participants felt about their body image. Most participants reported that friends, intimate partners, and coworkers had their perceptions of a beautiful woman, and these perceptions oscillated from a fat dark-skinned woman to a slender light-skinned woman to a curvy, medium weight and chocolate-skinned woman. One young mother reported that her body has never looked the same since she gave birth. She hates that her waist has gotten bigger and when asked how her partner feels about her, she says that:

When I got married at 20, I had a very small waist and my husband made it a point reminding me that it’s one of the reasons he fell in love with me. But now I have added a few kilograms especially around my waist after having two children, I try everything from slimming pills to drinking lemon tea every day to get my waist back. It’s honestly frustrating and I hate going to parties with my friends because I don’t feel beautiful anymore.

All participants in the study endorsed comparing themselves to others, thus shaping their perceptions of a beautiful body in Ankole.

3.3. Relationship Influences

Contrary to the majority of participants being greatly influenced by their own perceptions of what a beautiful body should be, those who had positive relationships with parents and peers and relied largely on their religious beliefs did not perceive any body type as ideal but believed that a beautiful woman was one that was kind, decent, and God-fearing. These participants despite their age brackets described beauty as authentic. A few of the participants who identified as religious reported high self-assurance compared to those who did not consider themselves religious. One young woman considered herself as very religious, believing that the church can act as a solace for hope and love. She believes that her love for herself and her body regardless of how she looks is brought on by her faith in God. When asked how she feels about her body she says:

I am confident in my skin, God made us in his image, so everyone is beautiful; besides, we all can’t look the same. I always pray to God whenever I have feelings of self-doubt and hate.

Participants who listed positive relationships with their family, peers, and friends described their perceptions of beauty to be genuine and more authentic. Many participants reported having more positive relationships now that they are older. They also reported self-assurance and a positive outlook toward their bodies brought on by these relationships.

3.4. Dietary Habits

All participants reported adopting dietary habits based on the perceptions they have of their ideal body. However, it should be noted that dietary habits were consistent with expectations in the two contrasting societies in Ankole. Dietary habits of participants from rural Ankole encouraged weight gain and practices such as the all-dairy and carbohydrate diets. For example:

The Bahima girls only drink milk; fresh warm milk to be specific; they mix the yogurt with millet flour porridge, the milk will fatten the girl because the nourishment is of both carbohydrate and protein.

Dietary habits of participants from urban centers and towns in Ankole encouraged weight loss or overeating. Diets consisted of refined food, evasive diets such as juicing, plant-based diets, and no-carb diets. Participants who adopted such dietary habits were most likely between the ages of 20 and 24 years and were either working or at the university. The majority of the participants who adopted these diets reported low confidence and self-hate toward their bodies brought on by peer pressure from friends and colleagues. An example:

During the lunch break at my workplace, my boss has a habit of pointing out our imperfections, like one time she told a friend of mine that she needs to eat more vegetables because she has a big tummy, so currently she’s on a no-carb diet.

A few participants at workplaces and school described practices of skipping meals and taking part in complicated diets such as all-green diets and no-carb diets as they struggled to attain the desired body. This often led to anxiety, stress, and underperformance at school and work.

4. Discussion

This paper aimed to investigate adolescents and young women’s perceptions of a beautiful woman in Ankole and how these perceptions have appeared to affect their feelings toward their bodies. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development (1934) and feminist theory on body image development [ 27 ] address the existing socio-cultural influences on the female body in Ankole brought on by ever-changing globalization. This is manifested in the contradictory perceptions of beauty expressed in the voices of these young women in Ankole. There are clearly both psychological and physical risks and benefits of different types of influences on beauty expectations. The long-term goal of the study is to develop an intervention to promote body positivity and high self-esteem in young women in Uganda. In order to realize this goal, the results of the study will significantly inform the conceptualization, design, and implementation of future interventions.

The socio-cultural theory posits that existing social norms such as those related to peer perceptions, parents, and the media influence behavior and thought processes among young people through the messages that are conveyed [ 11 ]. Adolescents aspire to fit in, and this may encourage their need to seek approval through adopting behavior that is supported by social agents [ 10 , 11 ].

The socio-cultural theory largely explains how young people learn from the interactions they have with important social agents in their lives, but it fails to elucidate the feelings young people develop when they make comparisons with existing beauty ideals in society. This study adopted the self-discrepancy conceptualization by Higgins (1987) that explains that when individuals, in this case adolescents, make comparisons with a person, most likely using images presented in society and find an incongruity, consequences arise. According to the literature [ 3 , 28 ], adolescent girls will modify their eating behaviors to fit the ideal standard of beauty presented in that society [ 3 ]. College students reported having developed eating disorders brought on by the slender ideal presented in the media through magazines and social media [ 28 ]. The self-discrepancy theory highlights the feelings young people develop when they make comparisons with unattainable images presented and may lead to the dissatisfaction and satisfaction they have with their body images. The study adopted the feminist theory of the body that looks to existing structures in society that have long focused on the body image of women with cultures all over the world presenting the desired image [ 12 , 26 ]. These cultures have traditional practices in place that put women’s bodies at the center of intrigue. These practices include female genital mutilation in many African states, feet binding in China, and female fattening in the northern and east of Africa.

Adolescent girls and young women’s perceptions of beauty may differ depending on what type of society they live in [ 29 ]. Beautiful women in Ankole as described by the majority of young adult girls are fat—this is shown in their description of a beautiful woman, where they compare her body to objects in nature. This finding is supported by literature [ 16 , 21 ] that claims the African cultural preference of a beautiful woman is fat. Studies by [ 21 ] show that this perception has encouraged young women to adopt unhealthy eating habits such as overeating and carb-loaded diets to attain this ideal. This has led to an increase in obesity and cardiovascular diseases among young women and girls.

However, it should also be noted that there has been a shift in paradigm where fatness was and is in some parts of Ankole synonymous with beauty. Findings show that while the perception of a beautiful woman in Ankole is fatness, this is not experienced by some in urban places in Ankole society that are more Westernized. Some of the young adult Ankole girls from urban areas described a beautiful woman as one that was medium with average-size hips and a large behind, which can be described as curvy with Eurocentric features of beauty. This was common in older and highly educated participants who reported a low level of self-assurance and confidence toward their bodies based on their descriptions. According to studies [ 1 , 7 , 20 , 29 ], there is a shift from the traditional perceptions of feminine beauty to more contemporary aspects of feminine beauty.

While the literature on some African cultures of the female body such as those of west Africa and south Africa [ 16 , 20 , 30 ] show that fatness is synonymous to beauty, this study contradicts such literature showing that some of the young adult girls from urban areas of Ankole are driven by the effects of globalization and have beauty expectations that are similar to Westernized views, which are largely Eurocentric. Many young women and girls from urban areas of Ankole have adopted a Westernized view of beauty that is the thinner and curvier body. Most of the comments made by others focus the participant on “shedding” the extra weight by adopting unhealthy eating habits such as skipping meals or adopting a no-protein diet to meet the unrealistic expectations of the body ideal.

In this study, rural districts of Ankole show that adolescent and young adult girls of the ages of 16–24 make internal and external beauty comparisons. Young women in rural Ankole may adopt the dietary habits of the Ankole society to strive for the fat beauty notion. Results showed that because slenderness is associated with being weak and unhealthy, young women who made positive comparisons to others with larger bodies adopted dietary habits that encouraged weight gain. The studies [ 16 , 19 ] look to the Ankole culture and the emphasis on a dairy diet of milk that acts as a source for enlarging their physical features. This supports the claim in [ 21 ] that women in Uganda seek extra weight to appear more desirable and similar to the rest of women in their culture, encouraging poor eating habits that may place them at risk for health problems such as obesity and cardiovascular diseases.

The findings also reflect how relationships in society influence beauty perceptions of young women and girls. According to [ 27 , 29 ], body dissatisfaction is greater for women in socially valued roles such as employment and romantic relationships. The finding resonates with a study on peer and parental relationships where the author found that parent and peer comments on appearance encouraged unhealthy body image [ 2 ]. Young people may dwell on such comments and in turn may flounder in their work [ 15 ]. These findings verify those of [ 2 ], indicating that young women and may internalize unrealistic beauty perceptions from significant others and employers, placing young adult girls at risk of developing unrealistic perceptions of their bodies based on the poor judgements toward their bodies brought on by those close to them.

Similar to [ 2 , 9 , 31 , 32 ], this study suggests that socio-cultural influences affect the way perceptions of body image and beauty develop. While most socio-cultural influences such as parents, peers, religion, and the media reported in the study tend to create a negative body image based on unrealistic perceptions of beauty, the young women in the study reported that these socio-cultural influences also encouraged their positive perceptions of their bodies. The authors of [ 33 ] explain that when surrounded by people who constantly focus on what is inside one’s mind and not the outside, a person’s perception of beauty tends to focus more on the mind. This finding suggests that positive relationships with affirmations may encourage positive perceptions of the body.

Limitations

The sample was limited to 30 participants in particular districts in Ankole to provide their experiences with the existing social expectations of the female body. Therefore, the findings are limited in their representativeness of young women in these areas. The participants included were purposively selected; thus, they are not representative of the larger population of all adolescent girls and young women in Ankole. Girls of 18 and below tended to be less expressive than young women older than 18, so many of the narrative illustrations were for participants above 18 years old. Therefore, the findings may not represent all experiences of adolescent girls and young women. Future research on a larger population across the different regions within Uganda is encouraged, given that Uganda is a multi-culture state with differing beauty ideals.

5. Conclusions

This study has shown that adolescent girls and young women’s perceptions of beauty largely stem from socio-cultural influences; the study shows that young people will seek to attain unrealistic body shapes and sizes largely because the societies in which they live have created these images. Perceptions of these unrealistic images are shown to be shaped by socialization to outside influences such as the media. It can be argued that perceptions born out of such influences encourage unrealistic goals of body appearance, in turn affecting young people’s self-esteem. Findings suggest the need for a reframing of the emphasis on other positive developmental assets of young women rather than on their physical appearance. Government campaigns with supportive curricula and media messages that focus on building the self-esteem of young people could positively contribute to fostering generations of young women who are full of self-confidence and national pride.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the Mbarara University of science and technology and the Participants from the Ankole region. The author wishes to thank Alex Kukundakwe, Noreen Atwijukire and Arinatwe Rita for data management.

Interview questions (Narrative interviews) for young women and girls.

• How would you describe a beautiful woman in the Ankole culture? (Introduce the topic)
• In your own opinion with body image, how do you fit within the Ankole culture beauty standards? (Probes for positives and negatives)
• As a young person growing up in in this society, have you and other young women of Ankole compared yourselves to young women and girls in media (social media that is Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, and the local media) and the media?
• In your own experience, how do young women and girls talk about their bodies when in each other’s company? (Probe: How often?)
• As young woman growing up, have you had positive/negative attitudes about dark skin and light skin?
• Why do you think women and girls are much more likely to engage in body appearance than men and boys? (Probe: Why women and girls and not men and boys? Why men and boys and not women and girls?)
• As a young man or boy, how would you describe a typical female body you desire and dislike? (Probe for appreciation and shaming conversations over female body image: What reactions do you have to those kinds of conversations? Do you ever have conversations like this?)
• Have you ever been in a relationship? (Probe for (1) positive appreciation of her body by the fiancée. (2) Positive appreciation for self-perception of her body due to the comment made by the fiancée/partner/fiancée. (3) Shaming comments of her body made by her fiancée/partner/boyfriend. (4) Her self-perception of her body from the shaming comments made by her fiancée/partner/boyfriend.)

Facilitators and Barriers to Body Image Among Adolescents Girls and Young Women

• What was happening with your body during this time?
• What messages did you receive about your body and appearance?
• What did people say about your body?
• What kinds of non-verbal messages did you receive?
• When do you focus on the physical aspects that you think need to be changed?
• When do you feel comfortable with what you see? What traits do you like?
• How do others respond to your appearance now? Does this have an effect on your feelings of body criticism or acceptance?
• What circumstances, emotions, thoughts, or other factors might impact whether you feel positively or poorly about your body in your current daily life?
• To what extent does “body criticism” limit, constrain, hurt, or otherwise feel oppressive to you?
• Does it cause harmful body practices such as over or under-eating, over or under-exercising, etc.?
• How much time do you spend thinking about your body and appearance in interactions with others? How do you think body criticism affects your interactions with others?
• How often do you engage in conversations about body image, and how do you think they affect you?
• As a young person growing, how did your attitude about skin tone develop throughout your life, particularly your childhood?
• Is there a body shaming issue at school, in your homes, from the community and intimate relationships? (Probe: If you feel there is body shaming, what should be done about it?)
• In your own experience, because of the media, is there a specific definition of a ‘perfect body’ that young women and girls want to achieve? (Probe: What struggles do you go through to achieve this body?)
• In your own experience, does the Ankole traditional society create an unattainable body image for young women, and how do you feel about the way the media portrays women and men?
• In your own experience, what do we do about the ways we view our bodies a norm that has been ingrained into our psyche for many years?

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, R.K.; methodology, R.K.; validation, R.K., C.M. and D.A.; formal analysis, R.K.; investigation, R.K.; resources, R.K.; data curation, R.K.; writing—original draft preparation, R.K.; writing—review and editing, S.K.; supervision, C.M., S.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study has been approved for a period of one year from 25 November 2019 to 24 November 2020 and the approval number is SS466ES. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Mbarara University of Science and Technology and the Uganda National Council for Science & Technology. After recruitment.

Informed Consent Statement

Consent forms were distributed to young adults above the age of 18. They were given detailed information on the study and the minimal risks it might bring up, such as the topic of discussion may bring out memories or experiences that might trigger uncomfortable memories. It is also possible that you might get tired during the interview or find some of the questions hard or uncomfortable to answer. Assent forms were distributed to young people below the age of 18 with a parent and guardian present. The researcher described the research in detail, explaining the purpose and importance of the study. Then, consent forms were presented to the parents asking if they would allow their child to take part in the study, including interviews without the parent present to facilitate the discussion of personal perceptions. Participants were reminded that participation was voluntary and that all data were confidential and protected by assigning a unique identification number to the interview transcripts instead of their names. Assent forms were signed by the younger girls following parental consent.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Essays About Beauty: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Writing essays about beauty is complicated because of this topic’s breadth. See our examples and prompts to you write your next essay.

Beauty is short for beautiful and refers to the features that make something pleasant to look at. This includes landscapes like mountain ranges and plains, natural phenomena like sunsets and aurora borealis, and art pieces such as paintings and sculptures. However, beauty is commonly attached to an individual’s appearance,  fashion, or cosmetics style, which appeals to aesthetical concepts. Because people’s views and ideas about beauty constantly change , there are always new things to know and talk about.

Below are five great essays that define beauty differently. Consider these examples as inspiration to come up with a topic to write about.

1. Essay On Beauty – Promise Of Happiness By Shivi Rawat

2. defining beauty by wilbert houston, 3. long essay on beauty definition by prasanna, 4. creative writing: beauty essay by writer jill, 5. modern idea of beauty by anonymous on papersowl, 1. what is beauty: an argumentative essay, 2. the beauty around us, 3. children and beauty pageants, 4. beauty and social media, 5. beauty products and treatments: pros and cons, 6. men and makeup, 7. beauty and botched cosmetic surgeries, 8. is beauty a necessity, 9. physical and inner beauty, 10. review of books or films about beauty.

“In short, appreciation of beauty is a key factor in the achievement of happiness, adds a zest to living positively and makes the earth a more cheerful place to live in.”

Rawat defines beauty through the words of famous authors, ancient sayings, and historical personalities. He believes that beauty depends on the one who perceives it. What others perceive as beautiful may be different for others. Rawat adds that beauty makes people excited about being alive.

“No one’s definition of beauty is wrong. However, it does exist and can be seen with the eyes and felt with the heart.”

Check out these essays about best friends .

Houston’s essay starts with the author pointing out that some people see beauty and think it’s unattainable and non-existent. Next, he considers how beauty’s definition is ever-changing and versatile. In the next section of his piece, he discusses individuals’ varying opinions on the two forms of beauty: outer and inner. 

At the end of the essay, the author admits that beauty has no exact definition, and people don’t see it the same way. However, he argues that one’s feelings matter regarding discerning beauty. Therefore, no matter what definition you believe in, no one has the right to say you’re wrong if you think and feel beautiful.

“The characteristic held by the objects which are termed “beautiful” must give pleasure to the ones perceiving it. Since pleasure and satisfaction are two very subjective concepts, beauty has one of the vaguest definitions.”

Instead of providing different definitions, Prasanna focuses on how the concept of beauty has changed over time. She further delves into other beauty requirements to show how they evolved. In our current day, she explains that many defy beauty standards, and thinking “everyone is beautiful” is now the new norm.

“…beauty has stolen the eye of today’s youth. Gone are the days where a person’s inner beauty accounted for so much more then his/her outer beauty.”

This short essay discusses how people’s perception of beauty today heavily relies on physical appearance rather than inner beauty. However, Jill believes that beauty is all about acceptance. Sadly, this notion is unpopular because nowadays, something or someone’s beauty depends on how many people agree with its pleasant outer appearance. In the end, she urges people to stop looking at the false beauty seen in magazines and take a deeper look at what true beauty is.

“The modern idea of beauty is taking a sole purpose in everyday life. Achieving beautiful is not surgically fixing yourself to be beautiful, and tattoos may have a strong meaning behind them that makes them beautiful.”

Beauty in modern times has two sides: physical appearance and personality. The author also defines beauty by using famous statements like “a woman’s beauty is seen in her eyes because that’s the door to her heart where love resides” by Audrey Hepburn. The author also tackles the issue of how physical appearance can be the reason for bullying, cosmetic surgeries, and tattoos as a way for people to express their feelings.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about fashion .

10 Helpful Prompts To Use in Writing Essays About Beauty

If you’re still struggling to know where to start, here are ten exciting and easy prompts for your essay writing:

While defining beauty is not easy, it’s a common essay topic. First, share what you think beauty means. Then, explore and gather ideas and facts about the subject and convince your readers by providing evidence to support your argument.

If you’re unfamiliar with this essay type, see our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Beauty doesn’t have to be grand. For this prompt, center your essay on small beautiful things everyone can relate to. They can be tangible such as birds singing or flowers lining the street. They can also be the beauty of life itself. Finally, add why you think these things manifest beauty.

Little girls and boys participating in beauty pageants or modeling contests aren’t unusual. But should it be common? Is it beneficial for a child to participate in these competitions and be exposed to cosmetic products or procedures at a young age? Use this prompt to share your opinion about the issue and list the pros and cons of child beauty pageants.

Today, social media is the principal dictator of beauty standards. This prompt lets you discuss the unrealistic beauty and body shape promoted by brands and influencers on social networking sites. Next, explain these unrealistic beauty standards and how they are normalized. Finally, include their effects on children and teens.

Countless beauty products and treatments crowd the market today. What products do you use and why? Do you think these products’ marketing is deceitful? Are they selling the idea of beauty no one can attain without surgeries? Choose popular brands and write down their benefits, issues, and adverse effects on users.

Although many countries accept men wearing makeup, some conservative regions such as Asia still see it as taboo. Explain their rationale on why these regions don’t think men should wear makeup. Then, delve into what makeup do for men. Does it work the same way it does for women? Include products that are made specifically for men.

There’s always something we want to improve regarding our physical appearance. One way to achieve such a goal is through surgeries. However, it’s a dangerous procedure with possible lifetime consequences. List known personalities who were pressured to take surgeries because of society’s idea of beauty but whose lives changed because of failed operations. Then, add your thoughts on having procedures yourself to have a “better” physique.

People like beautiful things. This explains why we are easily fascinated by exquisite artworks. But where do these aspirations come from? What is beauty’s role, and how important is it in a person’s life? Answer these questions in your essay for an engaging piece of writing.

Beauty has many definitions but has two major types. Discuss what is outer and inner beauty and give examples. Tell the reader which of these two types people today prefer to achieve and why. Research data and use opinions to back up your points for an interesting essay.

Many literary pieces and movies are about beauty. Pick one that made an impression on you and tell your readers why. One of the most popular books centered around beauty is Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon , first published in 1993. What does the author want to prove and point out in writing this book, and what did you learn? Are the ideas in the book still relevant to today’s beauty standards? Answer these questions in your next essay for an exiting and engaging piece of writing.

Grammar is critical in writing. To ensure your essay is free of grammatical errors, check out our list of best essay checkers .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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What Is Beauty?

Table of Contents

The concept of beauty is studied in sociology, philosophy, psychology, culture, and aesthetics.

It is regarded as a property of an object, idea, animal, place, or a person, and it often interpreted as balance and harmony with nature.

Beauty as a concept has been argued throughout the entire history of civilization, but even today, there is neither single definition accepted by many people nor shared vision.

People think that something or someone is beautiful when it gives them feelings of attraction, placidity, pleasure, and satisfaction, which may lead to emotional well-being.

If speaking about a beautiful person, he or she can be characterized by the combination of inner beauty (personality, elegance, integrity, grace, intelligence, etc.) and outer beauty or physical attractiveness.

The interpretation of beauty and its standards are highly subjective. They are based on changing cultural values.

Besides, people have unique personalities with different tastes and standards, so everyone has a different vision of what is beautiful and what is ugly.

We all know the saying that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

That’s why writing a beauty definition essay is not easy. In this article, we will explore this type of essay from different angles and provide you with an easy how-to writing guide.

Besides, you will find 20 interesting beauty essay topics and a short essay sample which tells about the beauty of nature.

What is beauty essay?

Let’s talk about the specifics of what is beauty philosophy essay.

As we have already mentioned, there is no single definition of this concept because its interpretation is based on constantly changing cultural values as well as the unique vision of every person.

…So if you have not been assigned a highly specific topic, you can talk about the subjective nature of this concept in the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder essay.”

Communicate your own ideas in “what does beauty mean to you essay,” tell about psychological aspects in the “inner beauty essay” or speak about aesthetic criteria of physical attractiveness in the “beauty is only skin deep essay.”

You can choose any approach you like because there are no incorrect ways to speak about this complex subjective concept.

How to write a beauty definition essay?

When you are writing at a college level, it’s crucial to approach your paper in the right way.

Keep reading to learn how to plan, structure, and write a perfect essay on this challenging topic.

You should start with a planning stage which will make the entire writing process faster and easier. There are different planning strategies, but it’s very important not to skip the essential stages.

• Analyzing the topic – break up the title to understand what is exactly required and how complex your response should be. Create a mind map, a diagram, or a list of ideas on the paper topic.
• Gathering resources – do research to find relevant material (journal and newspaper articles, books, websites). Create a list of specific keywords and use them for the online search. After completing the research stage, create another mind map and carefully write down quotes and other information which can help you answer the essay question.
• Outlining the argument – group the most significant points into 3 themes and formulate a strong specific thesis statement for your essay. Make a detailed paper plan, placing your ideas in a clear, logical order. Develop a structure, forming clear sections in the main body of your paper.

If you know exactly what points you are going to argue, you can write your introduction and conclusion first. But if you are unsure about the logical flow of the argument, it would be better to build an argument first and leave the introductory and concluding sections until last.

Stick to your plan but be ready to deviate from it as your work develops. Make sure that all adjustments are relevant before including them in the paper.

Keep in mind that the essay structure should be coherent.

In the introduction, you should move from general to specific.

• Start your essay with an attention grabber : a provocative question, a relevant quote, a story.
• Then introduce the topic and give some background information to provide a context for your subject.
• State the thesis statement and briefly outline all the main ideas of the paper.
• Your thesis should consist of the 2 parts which introduce the topic and state the point of your paper .

Body paragraphs act like constructing a block of your argument where your task is to persuade your readers to accept your point of view.

• You should stick to the points and provide your own opinion on the topic .
• The number of paragraphs depends on the number of key ideas.
• You need to develop a discussion to answer the research question and support the thesis .
• Begin each body paragraph with a topic sentence that communicates the main idea of the paragraph.
• Add supporting sentences to develop the main idea and provide appropriate examples to support and illustrate the point .
• Comment on the examples and analyze their significance .
• Use paraphrases and quotes with introductory phrases. They should be relevant to the point you are making.
• Finish every body paragraph with a concluding sentence that provides a transition to the next paragraph .
• Use transition words and phrases to help your audience follow your ideas .

In conclusion, which is the final part of your essay, you need to move from the specific to general.

• You may restate your thesis , give a brief summary of the key points, and finish with a broad statement about the future direction for research and possible implications.
• Don’t include any new information here.

When you have written the first draft, put it aside for a couple of days. Reread the draft and edit it by improving the content and logical flow, eliminating wordiness, and adding new examples if necessary to support your main points. Edit the draft several times until you are completely satisfied with it.

Finally, proofread the draft, fix spelling and grammar mistakes, and check all references and citations to avoid plagiarism. Review your instructions and make sure that your essay is formatted correctly.

Winning beauty essay topics

• Are beauty contests beneficial for young girls?
• Is it true that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder?
• Inner beauty vs physical beauty.
• History of beauty pageants.
• How can you explain the beauty of nature?
• The beauty of nature as a theme of art.
• The beauty of nature and romanticism.
• Concept of beauty in philosophy.
• Compare concepts of beauty in different cultures.
• Concept of beauty and fashion history.
• What is the aesthetic value of an object?
• How can beauty change and save the world?
• What is the ideal beauty?
• Explain the relationship between art and beauty.
• Can science be beautiful?
• What makes a person beautiful?
• The cult of beauty in ancient Greece.
• Rejection of beauty in postmodernism.
• Is beauty a good gift of God?
• Umberto Eco on the western idea of beauty.

The beauty of nature essay sample

The world around us is so beautiful that sometimes we can hardly believe it exists. The beauty of nature has always attracted people and inspired them to create amazing works of art and literature. It has a great impact on our senses, and we start feeling awe, wonder or amazement. The sight of flowers, rainbows, and butterflies fills human hearts with joy and a short walk amidst nature calms their minds. …Why is nature so beautiful? Speaking about people, we can classify them between beautiful and ugly. But we can’t say this about nature. You are unlikely to find an example in the natural world which we could call ugly. Everything is perfect – the shapes, the colors, the composition. It’s just a magic that nature never makes aesthetic mistakes and reveals its beauty in all places and at all times. Maybe we are psychologically programmed to consider natural things to be beautiful. We think that all aspects of nature are beautiful because they are alive. We see development and growth in all living things, and we consider them beautiful, comparing that movement with the static state of man-made things. Besides, maybe we experience the world around us as beautiful because we view it as an object of intellect and admire its rational structure. Nature has intrinsic value based on its intelligible structure. It’s an integral part of our lives, and it needs to be appreciated.

On balance…

We have discussed specifics of the “what is true beauty essay” and the effective writing strategies you should use to approach this type of academic paper. Now it’s time to practice writing.

You should write whenever you have a chance because practice makes perfect. If you feel you need more information about writing essays, check other articles on our website with useful tips and tricks.

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