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 😭)
Beauty has always been about rarity, status and wealth.
White cis hetero beauty standards enforce capitalist and bigoted ideals to keep minorities and poor whites down.
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.
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.
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?
You can’t please everyone
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”.
😭
It’s a selection bias. The only unsolicited comments about your body are from mean people.
Or a different selection bias. People want to sell products and they tell everybody that their life would be better with their product.
The only people who listen are those who are not happy with their lives.
Of course selling products like this is mean.
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.
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.)
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
Well, sure. Nobody should be proud of something they got by birth, and I do think beauty as something you DO or even buy is more egalitarian than a standard based on heredity, where you can just lose or win and can’t change it.
Overall I have seen the ideal of beautiful get much more varied and diverse over my lifetime, which is nice, too.
That’s a pretty interesting idea, something relating to self determination I imagine.
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.
Have to market products somehow.
It’s about making women have low self esteem and always willing to change ourselves to meet expectations. It makes it easier to get us to submit in other ways.
Can’t sell you products if you’re happy with yourself
While also selling solutions to “problems.” Meta platforms in particular have set up their advertising algorithms to know when women are feeling bad about themselves based on their posts, to sell cosmetics
Yeah. I honestly hate it more and more each day :/
