On Human Beauty
Trying to figure out how to survive the beauty industrial complex and come out unscathed
I’ve been thinking…
About beauty standards.
Some background
As I start to write today, Olivia Rodrigo’s “all american b****” is playing in the background, a fitting introduction to the topic du jour. As Rodrigo plays with the conventions of beauty and decorum she’s expected to uphold, I’m reflecting on the time-consuming, wallet-emptying, and soul-crushing levels of pressure women endure to live up to societal standards with their roots in numerous systems of oppression.
A lot of my thoughts today are inspired by Katie Gatti Tassin, a writer and educator in the personal finance space, who also shares other thoughts on the Substack Off Days. In this week’s post entitled “Wrinkled conscientious objectors,” she deconstructs the systems that have trapped women into thinking that anti-aging and youthfulness are the beauty ideal to strive for. One observation she makes is that younger and younger women are getting Botox injections regularly, uncannily creating a reverse effect where they end up often looking older while older women try to look young.
Even a simple Google image search of “botox” seem to show a younger population than I would expect to be represented (but can we even make correct assumptions about age as easily anymore?).
My personal history
I feel lucky to have grown up without feeling a strong stigma around aging or its accompanying signs: wrinkles, gray hair, and the like. “Aging gracefully” was a concept that became more prevalent once I was exposed to more media—makeover shows of the 2000s, celebrity magazines in waiting rooms, the advent of social media sites and their constantly-moving targets.
These media messages started to infiltrate the real-life messages I got, both explicitly and implicitly, from the people around me. Friends and neighbors, classmates and family members, all internalized the shifting standards to at least some degree, and once puberty hit, I started to be more aware of “not being skinny enough,” how other girls dressed and did their hair, and what an ideal face was supposed to look like.
One subtly vicious moment was on the bus to a church camp when I was middle-school age. In a group of girls, we collectively decided how we’d create the “perfect person” with features from each girl. I waited with bated breath to hear what they might pick from me, and of course it was my blue eyes, a feature I’d never struggled to embrace, as it fit a particular standard perpetuated by systems of white supremacy that undergird a lot of how we view beauty today. But someone else’s legs got chosen, someone else’s skin, someone else’s jawline, and those things stick with you.
High school was when what I wore became more top of mind, and I felt like I never measured up or caught up to the trends of the time. While less directly tied to the manipulation of the physical body, clothing and fashion certainly have a place in how we subscribe to and succumb to beauty standards. The patterns, cuts, colors, brands, and draping of the clothes we wear all contribute to how we perceive and are perceived. As layering tanks have gone out of fashion, the layers of messaging about how appearance is tied to worth have accumulated and hardened.
College is when my physical appearance became the focus of my beauty routine, and I wore makeup every single day to class and work. For a lot of my friends at the time, beauty was a common topic of conversation, and it made me feel pretty insecure about how my body compared to them and what I was doing or not to optimize every little aspect of how I presented to the outside world.
I was never doing anything crazy to change how I looked, but it’s the subtle maintenance and wear and tear at your self confidence that end up being the most nefarious. What did this look like at the time? For me, it was regularly buying $50 foundation that my friend recommended even though I couldn’t really afford it, feeling like the reason I wasn’t getting asked out on dates was because I wasn’t as pretty as the other options, having an identity crisis over my blonde hair naturally darkening over time, and figuring out how to get regular exercise that I didn’t hate.
Fast forward to today: I still have plenty of outside influence making me feel like how I look is never quite good enough, but I think I’ve settled into a happier routine with a bit less intervention and worry over my image. I still have a long way to go. And I don’t blame myself for this, as I recognize that the constant bombardment of media is designed and has evolved to make me feel inferior.
(More to come in the future on how cell phones play into both this and myriad other social problems.)
Hot or not? Gathering celebrity attractiveness data
For a recent “PowerPoint night,” I prepared a presentation on men’s vs. women’s perceptions of celebrity attractiveness.
My original interest in the topic stemmed from a couple conversations I had with men who had very different expectations of who I’d find attractive. I’ve also been frequently baffled by People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” covers (Blake Shelton tipped me over the edge—they’re clearly chosen for PR purposes rather than from any sort of survey data). So I set out to see what the people truly thought.
In order to get some data on this, I sent out a survey via Instagram stories to have people rate a set of male and female celebrities, and then compared the data based on the gender of the respondents. My hypothesis at the outset was that who men think women find attractive would not be as accurate as who women think men find attractive.
I was proven wrong. In my small sample size, I found that men predicted women’s preferences slightly better than women predicted men’s. But I was correct in assuming that the preferences themselves would be very different.
For context, here are some screenshots of my presentation that show the pool of celebrities that were rated and some of my main takeaways:
While I don’t really believe in the validity of rating people’s physical appearance and recognize that it’s a fairly subjective measure, I wanted to explore the topic to try to gain a better understanding of what we’re up against. In a world where Lupita Nyong’o receives an average rating of 5.3 from men, we straight women don’t stand a chance at all. And for my part, I remind the men in my audience that they don’t stand a chance with women like her, either, so it’s a lose-lose…
Unless, we recognize that it doesn’t matter as much as we are made to believe—which is the crux of my argument in favor of embracing ourselves in our wholeness, without undue concern for the shape of our brows, the variation of our outfits, or the number we read on the scale. So, to all who might be affected by these pervasive and unattainable standards, let’s get off the so-called hamster wheel that’s dragging us into financial traps, mental distress (varying from barely detectable to disordered), and an ever-elusive ideal.
There’s deeper worth on the other side.
I’ve been gathering…
Recommendations. In lieu of two additional musings today, I’ve collected a bibliography of sorts in relation to my thoughts on the beauty industrial complex. If you’d like any further reading or listening on the massive subject that is human beauty, here are just a few suggestions of things I’ve found enlightening, entertaining, or enriching:
Podcast episodes
Beauty is $$$: How to Hop Off the “Hot Girl Hamster Wheel” from the Money with Katie Show
An almost mind-blowing conversation between Katie Gatti Tassin and Jessica DeFino, inspiring lots of rethinking of beauty habits and how they play into financial
Beauty, Botox, and Bleach: The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel in 2024
An update from Katie and Henah Velez on how things are today
Fen Phen & Redux from Maintenance Phase
An exploration of diet pills from the 90s and the impact they had on weight loss narratives.
Videos
the “natural blonde” debate & hair color politics | Internet Analysis
This was painful to get through because I related so much.
Articles
Physical attractiveness
Nothing like a thorough Wikipedia article to get the juices flowing.
Who is a “Rodent Man”?
The rat boy narrative goes mainstream at the New York Times, where the Style Desk unpacks what this new label even means.
Books
More Than a Body: Your Body is an Instrument, Not an Ornament by Lexie Kite and Lindsay Kite
This book really transformed my relationship with this topic and its implications for broader society.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
This month’s pick for the book club I’m part of. It’s a collection of science fiction short stories (including the title story, which was the basis for the movie Arrival), and the last story in the collection, “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” really stuck with me. It explores a world in which people can essentially “turn off” their ability to perceive any differences in facial beauty/attractiveness. Reading this over the weekend was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back and got me to finally write on this topic.
Thanks, as always, for tuning in,
Nicole