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| Learn How Our Standards Of Beauty Have Changed Throughout History |
According to Learn How Our Standards Of Beauty Have Changed Throughout History, Ancient Egyptians believed that “slim, high [waisted women with dark black hair with] golden or bright skin” was the ideal image of beauty. The unibrow, however, quite popular in ancient Greece. By the 1920s, the beauty ideals of a flapper wear a “slim” or “boyish silhouette” and women started to “[value] an athletic built”. The ideal image of beauty has certainly changed throughout the centuries, with some trends making a come up for the worst.
A research study discussed in Why Do Beauty Standards Change? This Study Shows That Just One Image Can Warp Your Beauty Standards shows how one’s environment can easily alter what it means to be beautiful. The researchers wanted to discover how people, who haven’t been surrounded by a constant media presence or “media- naive”, were affected by images of different sized models. 80 men and women from Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast volunteered to participate and were “asked to describe their ideal body shape”. 40 of the participants viewed 72 images of plus-size models. The other half views 72 images of thin models. After viewing the images, the researchers asked what were the participants’ ideal body image again and found that “The people who had been looking at plus-size images made their idealized female bodies fit that standard, while those who'd been gazing at size zero women also changed their ideal to fit what they'd seen”. This change in ideal beauty was a representation of how “decades of saturation of mainstream media’s beauty ideals” have affected the population. The researcher also pointed how the “shocking...the experiment was [since] it only took a small amount of exposure… for the subjects...to shift their ideas completely. According to the article, the simulation took 15 minutes. A new way to help prevent or lessen the fast impact beauty ideals is through what's called “Media literacy”, which educates people how “media distortion works, from Photoshop to the production of unrealistic ideals”. A study done in 2005 found that “images that idealized thin models were far less impactful if the [the subjects] were given a [media literacy] course”. The idea of continuously questioning one's ideas, known as “cognitive dissonance”, has brought hope for lessening the impact of “thin is in” ideals.
Whether it was from people taking “media literacy” courses or more people starting to appreciate all shapes and sizes, a shift in beauty norms has definitely started to take place across the globe, most notably in the 1990s according to Women’s idealised bodies have changed dramatically over time – but are standards becoming more unattainable?. Before curvy, brown, and any other non-ideal features became popular, “overweight women were… portrayed as unintelligent, greedy, and unable to form romantic attachment. There has also been increasing focus on the health risks associated with being overweight”. This combination of being overweight effects instilled fear into the majority women and created unrealistic thin aspirations. It was shown with “overwhelming evidence that body dissatisfaction is a risk factor for disordered eating, consideration of cosmetic surgery, and poorer psychological well-being in general”. These physically and mentally unhealthy ideas are being challenged, however. In developing countries like Nicaragua, Western beauty ideals are being challenged in Belize where “young women have re-interpreted the thin ideal - allowing it to be more curvy, which is consistent with local norms and body shapes”. The “thin trend” is now being diversified with people of all sizes, and curly-haired, brown-skinned, broad nose and other non-European features are being shown more often in the media alongside idealized European features.
In my next blog post, I will research: How has culture affected the idea of beauty across the world?
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