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African American Beauty Standards

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African American rapper “Lil’Kim” publicly admitted to getting surgery and bleaching her skin, saying “really beautiful women that left me thinking, how I can I compete with that? Being a regular black girl wasn 't good enough.” This trend of women being unhappy with their bodies is not uncommon. 53% of 13-year-old American girls are unhappy with their bodies, this grows to 78% by the time they are 17 (Maine, 2011). Due to this, more women result to practices making themselves more “attractive”. One of these practices is the art of wearing cosmetics. Self-conscious women are more likely to wear cosmetics than less self-conscious women and report that they believe their social interactions are more pleasurable when they wear makeup (Miller & …show more content…

There are several sources of beauty standards. Fairy tales play a large part is solidifying feminine beauty ideals and it has a huge effect on both children and adults. Psychiatrists found out that the influence of fairytales extend into adult life (Stafford, 1934). Fairytales like Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella lay emphasis on the beauty of the protagonists and the ugliness of the antagonists. For example, because Cinderella is beautiful she is also nice whilst her step sisters are evil and therefore ugly. This results in readers who do not conform to these beauty standards feeling ugly and insecure. Self- image, to some degree is shaped by exposure to images found in books, movies, etc. Moreover, it is clear that children, if they are to develop a positive self-image, need to see themselves in texts (Hurley …show more content…

These days, advertisements are made with the aid of photoshop which creates an unattainable image of beauty and thus, puts pressure on women to achieve these standards. Photoshop in the beauty industry involves manipulating a picture to make it flawless. Magazines photoshop these images by toning the abdomen, removing every facial blemish, defining the cheekbones, etc. In 2003, actress Kate Winslet criticized GQ magazine for photoshopping her picture saying, “The retouching is excessive, I do not look like that and more importantly, I don’t desire to look like that”. Many women are bothered by the seemingly perfect models they see on the billboards, in television adverts and on magazine covers. Anorexia survivor Erin Treloar said “my eating disorder was perpetuated by retouched magazine photos”. Beauty standards has such a giant effect on women emotionally, psychologically and physically. The pressure on women to be thin leads to unhealthy weight loss practices (Battle & Brownell, 1996), eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia (Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-Dunn, 1998) and low self-esteem (Tiggeman & Stevens,

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A majority of the population was ugly even though the idealistic standard of beauty was far above the average person living there. Instead of tall, muscular, light, and carefree people, most ended up being dark, small, and unattractive. This relates largely in the current society because magazines portray thin to be beautiful, and until the last decade has this beauty standard started to change. When things as simple as a beauty standard are different from the current world, it allows readers to think upon the idea of living in a different

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Photo editing convinces viewers that the ideal women should look a certain way, which is impossible to do naturally. The article includes statistics on the growing number of teens having cosmetic surgery. Even an experiment was conducted in this research paper, a study included 263 females and 130 males, with an average age of 15 years old. Some were given surveys to fill and some were given retouched and unretouched photos in different groups and asked to rate the attractiveness of the people in the photos. The results were that the girls felt more of a concern with appearance and pressure to meet the media’s ideals, and greater objectified body consciousness.

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“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are”, once said Marilyn Monroe who took us to the time where you had likely loved your body and valued the numerous things it could do. In any case, on your way to adulthood, suspicious and insecurities may have slinked in. Rather than appreciating your own body qualifications and capabilities, you launch into lashing its looks. In a society where the perfect woman must have the most attractive, sexier and exemplary body and appearance, you may feel unqualified. Taking a head from this, the article “Is Photoshop Destroying America’s Body Image?”

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Photoshop and the “corrective” trend are impacting society so much that celebrities themselves are trying to move away from that trend. Businesses want to portray the perfect picture; celebrities, especially women, want to be portrayed as imperfect. This has caused a clash between the need of businesses and the willingness of celebrities. The result is a parallel trend promoted by some celebrities in which they take pictures of themselves without photoshop and without makeup. This new trend is to reflect to society that

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The presented image tends to display the updated fashion that society should buy and dress like. It is misconceived that oneself will be more acceptable and likeable if they are fashionable and appealing. Many girls wear excessive amounts of makeup via this same belief, the belief that they will be rejected or disregarded if they fail to fulfill this precedent. With this precedent, social media has sculpted the “ideal body” that people should strive for. On top of being fashionable and attractive, the ideal body is commonly fit and in shape.

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Everyone and their grandmother has watched Disney movies. Some of Disney’s most iconic movies are their modern day reinterpretations of common fairy tales and the princesses with in them such as Cinderella, Jasmine, Snow White, and Rapunzel. However, anyone with eyes can notice that all of their princesses no matter their background rhave one thing in common; They are all fashionably, sometimes impossibly, skinny. And by contrast, many of the villains particularly the female ones are seen as undesirable. Being undesirable, particularly in the case of Cinderella, is shown by making her stepsisters fat and ugly.

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I predict this is because the pretty people want nothing to do with the children who are considered ugly. They want to forget about them so they can focus on the perfect world that they live in now. I wonder why, would they solve this problem of people judging and not including others by changing the way they look? Possibly, because they feel it is the only way to make people equal. One of the main characters presents a question during this novel and it is “How about making them smarter?”

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Disney tells stories about pretty girls and princes who meet each other once and fall in love. This indirectly implants in children’s mind that appearance and materialism does matter, which might lead to vanity. For instance, the Hunchback of Notre Dame shows us that no matter how caring and kind Quasimodo is, Esmeralda and Phoebus are one couple because they are adequately good-looking. Another research has shown that in Disney classic movies, female characters are praised for their appearances (55%) and only 11% are for their abilities; however, Disney has changed their practice as in the millennial Disney movies, women are commented on their skills and abilities more (40%). (Guo 2016)

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Beauty is a highly controversial topic, which comes into question every day. Beauty standards in America is a big issue in the country. One cannot go anywhere without being looked at and judged. Outer beauty appearance has become more important to people than anything else. This along with media outlets, beauty industries, and beauty standards has caused many to change how they look.

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The media portrays the average person as flawless, thin, tall, and beautiful. They advertise products that can help a person achieve what they call “perfection.” They slap photos all over the place, on billboards, magazines, and ads, showing us what a “real” person looks like. The media brainwashes us into believing that we need to meet their standards in order to achieve ultimate beauty and should we stray from the path they pave, we will not be considered beautiful. Our society places too much emphasis on our appearances, forcing many to undergo drastic changes to become “beautiful.”

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Flawless aesthetics is a goal that many individuals strive towards, women especially. In recent years, American society has been making efforts to subdue this trend. The revolutionary movement teaching individuals that they are beautiful in their own way is diminishing the negative attitude towards natural beauty. Through social media, celebrities and even cosmetic companies this mentality is being practiced around the globe. It convinces people that makeup and artificial alterations are not necessary, and current makeup trends reflect this approach.

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It is often said that “In the 50s and 60s, things were very different. The celebrities back then had real figures, with real curves There was no constant pressure to lose weight, and no internet or weekly gossip magazines flaunting bikini bodies to make us feel inferior” (De Lucia). Six to seven decades ago, not only was the beauty standard more lenient, but it was not as heavily forced onto people. It does not matter what the beauty standard looks like because girls will aspire to be whatever the standard is because it is what is idolized at the time. A trend through history can be seen as “beauty ideal continues to get smaller in our society, body image within American women continues to plummet” (Depicting Body Image).

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A societal image can hold a large amount of power, but it can be completely dangerous as a result. The superficiality of beauty can cause depression, eating disorders & suicide. According to alarming studies, approximately 90% of all women from 10 countries through

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Your decisions to comply with society’s view of “beauty” are no longer subconscious, but rather are more conscious-driven decisions. Barbie’s slender figure remains idolized; however, it has evolved from a plastic doll to a self-starving model that is photo-shopped on the pages of glossy magazines. You spend hours in front of a mirror adjusting and perfecting your robotic look while demanding your parents to spend an endless amount of money on cosmetics and harmful skin products to acquire a temporary version of beauty. Consider companies such as Maybelline, which have throughout the ages created problematic and infantilizing campaigns and products for women. More specifically consider the “Baby Lips” product as well as the company slogan, “maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline,” that reiterates the male notions of beauty to which women are subjected.

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As society’s image of the perfect woman evolved, technology eagerly developed to acommodate. Whether or not people are aware of the excessive photoshop editing, they do not realize how much editing takes place. Many people recognize that a photo has been altered, however, if given the original to compare, more changes would have been made than they expected. Fashion industries, such as Victoria’s Secret, have been improving their model pictures. This happens not only in America, but across the world.

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