Keeping Up with Beauty Standards: Am I Beautiful Yet?

D.H. Lawrence, an English novelist, summarized beauty best. He stated: Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. Lawrence is certainly right about beauty not being a fixed pattern because if it was, society wouldn’t constantly recycle their standards every season. Beauty standards are always evolving and thus impossible to keep up with which is why we need to question what ideal is worth following. We see how rapidly they change just by looking at the past 25 years since the early 2000s flouted the heroin chic body type and America’s Next Top Model has multiple examples of them upholding this standard. Heroin chic faded away in 2014 and the hourglass figure emerged thanks to influencers that dictate what standard is acceptable or not. A curvier figure was being pushed which led to an increase in surgeons performing BBLs and young women undergoing the knife for this enhancement and now we have a focus on being thin, yet youthful. Tiktok and Instagram overwhelm us with skin standards where influencers tell you the best anti-aging tips so that you can prevent those wrinkles on your forehead and those deep, harsh boob lines that we should, oddly, care too much about. It’s exhausting because the moment someone tries to achieve a standard the goalpost is pushed 50 yards back and the journey to being beautiful restarts. Beauty standards are inescapable, and you might be feeling lost wondering “What the FUCK do I do?!” 

You have a choice about what trends to follow and this agency will prevent you from being consumed by toxic beauty standards. Coexisting with beauty standards means identifying where your definition of beauty came from and determining whether it’s harmful for your health or not. Personally, beauty standards were thrust onto me from the time I was a young girl, and I’ve had to rewrite the definition of “beautiful” in my mind. I remember hearing this stupid saying about how much I eat (I’m sure many of you have) that begins like this-a moment on the lips and a lifetime on the hips. I got my first period at 10 and was already navigating these awkward changes from childhood to tweenhood and thought the fuck-now I gotta worry about food? I felt my aunts’ eyes stab my hands as I tried to grab a third slice of pizza, and a sense of shame swarmed inside my gut. Beauty standards are promoted by society through extension of family members who make comments on others’ bodies, and this perpetuates the vicious cycle. In addition to family, messages about how to look, how to dress, and how to act are now everywhere due to the popularity of social media and they often promote unattainable beauty ideals. I don’t think it helps to admonish anyone for adhering to beauty standards because it feels like I’m judging, similar to how beauty standards critique us for not conforming to them. Women and young girls spend a lot of their time thinking about beauty standards and choosing which ones to follow because they’ve likely heard too many comments about their appearance. Once you ignore others’ comments on your body you can finally decide what beauty is because you recenter whose opinion matters. 

Lawrence said beauty is only an experience we choose and nothing else. Beauty is mutable and if we try to contain something that adapts its form then we’ll only wear ourselves thin. However, if you feel a glow after a pedicure or from doing your makeup then that’s beauty. Beauty is deciding to pursue experiences that make you feel radiant, not anyone else.