So by the logic of “beauty standards”…I should starve myself, curl my hair, get a tan, cut off both my feet to lose height and then remove all of my ribs to get an hourglass figure? You know…can’t argue with that 🙃
Gladly…would
(except maybe the tan part, I really like being pale 😭)
You can’t please everyone
I realised this when I started secondary school, started seeing girls in my glass dyeing and straightening and curling and all that waste of time and money. Decided to not partake, no regrets so far after +10 years. No one is forcing, you can think for yourself.
Anything to sell more products. Diets, lotions, makeup, new clothes to fit your body shape, plastic surgery, botox, etc.
The capitalist machine grinds you down evermore.
by the logic of
I don’t mean to dismiss or deny that there is a lot of pressure on women to look certain ways, but I just can’t let bad logic slide.
A beauty product that doesn’t change your appearance in some way is of no value. Only a few very talented charlatans get away with selling $50 bottles of does nothing. By definition all beauty products make you “anything but who you are”.
The fact that there is no one unified beauty standard that everyone should try to copy, and that people can choose to look however they want, is to be celebrated, but OOP frames it as some sort of hypocrisy. It’s not clear what outcome OOP would prefer - presumably they want it mandated for everyone to stick with whatever they look like first thing out of bed, whether they like it or not? Or do they just not like the variety, and would like the rule to be that everyone should look like Kate Moss?
Makes me sad what society does to women. My little sister looks like a 40s Hollywood star or something. Totally beautiful person. She thinks she looks like Shrek.
Close, but its actually “whatever sells you a solution”.
That is exactly what ‘beauty standards’ are. Unobtainable. How otherwise could they constantly sell you stuff to ‘improve’ your look? Fashion, beauty, fitness, wellness sales are 100% dependent on you being convinced to hate yourself enough to buy, buy, buy.
How exactly do you “look whiter”?
There are products designed to whiten skin. They’re popular in India, and probably more places (I only know about it in India because I learned about them from reading an article about India specifically.)
It’s a selection bias. The only unsolicited comments about your body are from mean people.
I was thinking more like confirmation bias. There is no such thing as the one single beauty standard, people just remember the stuff that made them feel insecure.
Spray tans look bad IMO but technically its less harmful than tanning beds which are just dumb, literally just inducing UV damage. Faster skin aging and cancer risk increase, sounds really appealing.
Curly and straight hair are both great. Hell I like messy hair and short cuts on women. Admittedly, I couldn’t pull off short hair right now…
Gaining or losing weight is arguably a red herring, how hot you look has more to do with exercise and eating healthy consistently but not crash diets. Losing too much weight too quickly will make anyone (man or woman) look like a ghoul and gaining a ton of weight by eating garbage and not exercising generally looks pretty bad obviously.
I wonder if this is related to the IKEA effect. It was shown that people value something more highly if they helped creating it, like assembling IKEA furniture. Similarly it could be that people like their look better if they actively helped creating it instead of staying how they looked naturally.
Then why do I fucking hate IKEA
That’s a pretty interesting idea, something relating to self determination I imagine.
Women with brown/black hair are encouraged to dye their hair to look more “unique”.
Women with blonde hair are encouraged to dye their hair to avoid blonde jokes.
Women with red hair are encouraged to dye their hair to avoid ginger jokes.
Creating demand is a centerpiece of a Western world since about Edward Bernays.
I am trans, and my goal is to look as trans as possible. Take that society!
How’s the blahaj collection coming along?
If you take a mathematical average of all women or all men, you get someone out that is quite attractive. A few parameters are deemed more beautiful at the extremes, but if you are: neither overweight nor starving, have slightly wavy hair, are of medium height, have averaged away all illnesses… you’re starting from a good place.
