Beauty : The Importance Of Beauty Standards In Girls

Under society’s customs for decades, young women have found themselves immersed in the pressure and anticipation to have exemplary bodies. Nearly every young woman prefers to be slim, have a perfectly shaped body, that is beautified by applying pounds of makeup to their face but does not appear ridiculously overdone. Who’s responsible for these measures imposed on young women? When a young girl picks up the model on the cover of Vogue being called flawless, naturally it’s easy for her to then aspire to be a real-life imitation of the that model. These companies produce magazine covers shown with girls’ images daily. As if keeping the perfect body wasn’t hard enough, our culture also forces girls into the forever expanding world of composition, however, body image is a surging subject for young girls. Advertisements and pictures of lean female models are all over. Young women are measured and perplexed by their physical appearances with attire intended to raise their physical structures; social media, magazines, the society, marketing campaigns, advertisements, and the fashion gurus add to a strand of excellence.

Over time, there have been various ethical issues and injustices throughout centuries that are still evident and present in today’s society. One significant social injustice that our world continues to face is gender inequality and idealized beauty standards. When relating back to basic principles of gender inequality, women tend to be shown as inferior to men and specific occupations have been assigned gender roles. I agree with Naomi Wolf that gender inequality places more demands on both males and females and is a form of oppression, and her beliefs regarding ideal beauty. Wolf’s ideas surrounding gender inequality relate to Nietzsche 's theory regarding master and slave morality and man’s struggle to be a free spirit because those who adhere to society 's dictates on ideal beauty also have “slave morality”.

Society has set certain stereotypes to girls and women about what it is considered to be beautiful that girl’s focus more in their appearances than in their internal selves. Every girl deserves to feel beautiful because they all are, but how can girls think that they are beautiful if there is always that constant reminder of what being considered beautiful is. It is often seen on TV various shows where little girls are being judged by the way they walk, turn, how their makeup and hair is done and what they are wearing, and obviously their beauty. Society has set such high standards of what is considered beautiful and girls are being the victims of those standards. Girls now feel that they are not beautiful enough because they do not meet

Girls all around the U.S.A strive to be society’s “perfect” image. Using makeup, social media, and even plastic surgery to fit a false image. An impractical image that can ruin one's self-esteem and others.

Today’s beauty standards for women are extremely harmful, showing society that only one beauty standard is acceptable. This look is often portrayed as an underweight woman with pale skin, and long heat-treated hair. Plus size models are widening the diversity of beauty standards by showing society that there is more than one definition of beauty.

Beauty standards are portrayed everywhere: on magazines, social media, ads, commercials, and even flaunted among peers. While the ideals are supposed to promote health awareness, fitness motivation, and self love, it unfortunately results in many unfavorable consequences. Women are constantly “penalized for not being beautiful and at the same time are stigmatized, even pathologized, for not feeling beautiful, for having low self-esteem, for engaging in behaviors like dieting and excessive exercising, or for having eating disorders” (Johnston and Taylor 954). Beauty standards are unrealistic and unhealthy to pursue, and misinforms the public on what true beauty is. While not all beauty image ideals promote negative feelings and dissatisfaction, many believe that the negative effects far outweighs any positive effects.

Over the years a debate over who is to blame over the decline in how girls perceive themselves has arisen. With Photoshop being the societal norm concerning the media, it has become difficult for many to understand where the line between real and near impossible standards lies. Youths see an image edited to “perfection” and strive to reach the standards that they imagine due to the images displayed on magazines, television and social media. From Disney to magazines like Vogue the mass media bombards audiences with fake beauty that they, as normal people, will never be able to achieve. The mass media is responsible for causing the rise in the number of people with a poor body image, eating disorders, and cosmetic surgeries.

We live in a technological world and a society that is ruled by social media because anywhere and anytime that we are, we have our laptops, iphones, or ipads. We are constanly chasing and running from all different directions in order to catch up on what’s going on in social media such to find out how many “likes” and how many “followers does Kim Kardashian has?.” With that being said, our society have redefined beauty based on how much “likes” a person received on their Instagram pictures, a number on a scale, a premanufactured clothing size, an hourglass shape, slender thighs, or victoria’s secrect models. The society’s standards of beauty are unrealistic and impossible to achieve. As a result, unrealistic beauty standards affect girls

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

In this day and age, the epidemic of these so called ‘beauty’ standards is only getting worse and worse. Because of photo modification, low self esteem in regular everyday people is starting to become something that is nearly considered normal. Today, 42% of girls from age 5-8 want to be skinnier, 52% of girls aged 9 to 13 feel better when they are dieting and by the age of 17, 78% of girls are unhappy with their own bodies. Think about

Beauty standards have been a major issue for many years now and women have been willing to change their bodies over and over to please themselves and others. Beauty standards are often defined in terms of hairstyles, skin color, and body size. The measures involved in having to live up to these standards are often risky in nature. For decades, what is seen as beautiful is centered around a women’s weight and size. Today, that standard is often defined as being thin. Women often resort to drastic means to attain that ideal image. However, achieving these standards can be expensive, can lower self-esteem and can be a threat to a woman’s health and life.

It is a generally accepted principle that societies create standards of beauty, wherein certain features, qualities, or traits are posited as more attractive and desirable. These beauty standards differ among historical periods and localities and are disseminated through media, literature, and other forms of communication. In the modern era, beauty standards have often been found to be Eurocentric, which I define to mean ideals of beauty that correlate with and enforce whiteness (e.g. light skin, large eyes, thin noses, straight hair) and are the result of historical processes that contextualize whiteness as superior. Such beauty standards have been shown to apply more stringently and have greater effects on women; a 2002 study found that the positive correlation between lighter skin tones and higher perceived attractiveness was significantly stronger for Black women than for Black men, and in general, physical appearance is more socially emphasized as a measure of worth for women (Hill, 2002). For this paper, I will explore the ways in which Eurocentric beauty standards affect the self-esteems and life experiences of women of color who have predominantly lived both in Western and non-Western countries.

Now, let’s get the facts straight about “Beautiful” people’s self-esteem. Our self-esteem has been affected by the “Beautiful” people. We either have high or low self-esteems and the environment that we live in creates it. At work, school, and home we are surrounded by beautiful people with high self-esteems. The not so pretty people have low self-esteems towards the world and themselves. Dove gives plentiful facts about self-esteems related to beauty. Dove Self Esteem Fund, company, in the article "Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National report on the state of Self-Esteem" (2008), analyzes that girls have a lot of pressure due to emotional stress with ourselves. Dove gives a lot of ethos to back up each statement said. Dove talks about kids and parents in order to get to kids and parents to be involved in a positive way. This article attracts audience as young kids, teens, and parents. Parents also contribute to kid’s low self-esteem issues. Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem, commissioned by the Dove® Self-Esteem Fund, reveals that there is a self-esteem crisis in this country that pervades every aspect of a girl’s life including her looks, performance in school and relationships with friends and family members (Dove). Self-esteem is a key issue in the world. In the article it’s revealed as a crisis in the country and it’s mostly about beauty.

"Does this make me look fat?” Everyone at one time or another has experienced this iconic question in some way. Your best friend may have asked it, as she was getting ready for a date or maybe you muttered these words to yourself as you stared disapprovingly into a mirror; either way, this six-word question alludes to a standard of beauty that everyone strives to meet. A standard of beauty that is almost impossible to meet. The definition of beauty has evolved greatly over the years and it differs from culture to culture. Today, western culture idolizes the woman who is “thin, large breasted, and white (tanned, but not too brown)” (WVFV, pg. 220). This woman is one that millions of women strive to look like in

Beauty standards have been socially constructed in diverse and various shapes in every society or culture in the world, and cause people to think they are not beautiful if they do not fit the common standard of beauty that has been set by the society. Most people are pressured into the standard by the social milieu. The people who are different from the socially pursued standard of beauty do not think the standard itself is absurd, but they rather tend to be insecure about their appearance. Once people see the beauty through individual’s perspective, not through the socially constructed standard, they would realize how much they have unconsciously forced each other to be fit in the beauty standard. This is something that I have also experienced. I was not a person who fit in the standard of beauty, and that made me shy and timid. However, once I saw myself through a different perspective of beauty, I could see it as a social problem that unconsciously forces one particular standard of beauty.