Question: To what extent can ideas of beauty in the western world said to be bound up with notions of race?
In late modern times, the idealization of Western beauty spread to various areas in the world with globalization despite having different sense of beauty of cultures. The Western beauty, which is high eyebrows, large eyes, high cheekbones, a small nose, a narrow face (Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen and Wu, 1995, p. 268) and anti-ageing body, enforces itself with magazines and advertising that are published worldwide. According to the worldwide survey of Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (2004), more than half of participants answered that their bodies were disgusting from 32.000 teenaged girls and women (Yan and Bissel, 2014, p. 197). Eating disorder, depression, anorexia, bulimia, using cosmetic products and the rate of cosmetic surgery increase gradually on Western and non-Western women who lost self-esteem and had
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In traditional cultures, thinness indicates disease and poverty while high-weight is the symbol of wealth and healthiness (Witcomb, Arcelus and Chen, 2013, p. 333). Besides, small body is sign of beauty and attractiveness conformably with their physical appearance in East Asian culture (p. 333). However, traditional culture changed with Westernization and urbanization in 20th century (Swami, 2015, p. 45). Thus thin body ideal replaced instead of large body ideal. The change body image cause the increase of anorexia and bulimia nervosa in modernized Asian countries such as China and Japan. Another remarkable research of Musaiger and other scientists illustrate that the rate of eating disorder among teenage girls in the Arab countries which is susceptible from Western culture is close to the percentage in Western countries (Witcomb, Arcelus and Chen, 2013, p. 333). These foundations imply that there is powerful link between Westernization and eating